We document the extent, nature, and consequences of survey errors for receipt of cash welfare and SNAP in three major U.S. household surveys linked to administrative program records. Our results confirm high rates of misreporting of program receipt, particularly failure to report receipt. The...

In 2015, the Current Population Survey (CPS) eliminated three questions related to educational attainment. These questions are used by the NBER to calculate the variable, "Imputed Highest Grade Completed" (ihigrdc) in their Monthly Outgoing Rotation Group (MORG) extracts. Imputed Highest Grade...

Recent validation studies show that survey misreporting is pervasive and biases common analyses. Addressing this problem is further complicated, because validation data are usually convenience samples and access is restricted, making them more suitable to document than to solve the problem. I...

We examine the consequences of underreporting of transfer programs in household survey data for several prototypical analyses of low-income populations. We focus on the Current Population Survey (CPS), the source of official poverty and inequality statistics. We link administrative data for food...

Recent studies linking household surveys to administrative records reveal high rates of misreporting of program receipt. We use the FoodAPS survey to examine whether the findings of these studies of general household surveys using one or two states generalize to a survey with a narrow focus and...

Social surveys are often used to estimate unemployment duration distributions. Survey nonresponse may then cause a bias. We study this using a unique dataset that combines survey information of individual workers with administrative records of the same workers. The latter provide information on...

Using data on annual individual labor income from three representative panel datasets (German SOEP, British BHPS, Australian HILDA) we investigate a) the selectivity of item non-response (INR) and b) the impact of imputation as a prominent post-survey means to cope with this type of measurement...

In this paper, we analyze measurement and classification errors in several key variables, including earnings and educational attainment, in a matched sample of survey and administrative longitudinal data. The data, spanning 1994-2001 and covering all sectors in the Danish economy, are much more...

We analyse response patterns to an important survey of school children, exploiting rich auxiliary information on respondents' and non-respondents' cognitive ability that is correlated both with response and the learning achievement that the survey aims to measure. The survey is the Programme for...