Comparing administrative and survey data: Is information on education from administrative records of the German Institute for Employment Research consistent with survey self-reports?

Underreporting of Top Incomes and Inequality: A Comparison of Correction Methods using Simulations and Linked Survey and Tax Data

“…4 We find that underreporting in the survey occurs primarily in the upper part of the tax records income distribution and underreporting increases with income. The latter is also found in previous survey earnings validation studies for developed countries such as Abowd and Stinson (2013) and Adriaans et al (2020).…”

“…Interestingly, the point at which survey incomes are lower than tax return incomes corresponds to the minimum taxable income threshold for labor earnings, which represent the largest income component both in this subsample and in the full tax records distribution. In this case, the survey reporting pattern we obtain (overreporting in the lower tail and underreporting at the top) is in line with previous findings from the survey earnings validation literature (Adriaans et al ., 2020). The proportion of observations below the minimum income threshold in the linked sample is similar to that obtained for the full tax records distribution.…”

“…The latter is also found in previous survey earnings validation studies for developed countries such as Abowd and Stinson (2013) and Adriaans et al . (2020).…”

“…Because most likely the behavior underlying item nonresponse is different from misreporting, this would warrant a separate type of analysis.3 In fact, the survey earnings validation literature concludes that the definition of a true distribution largely depends on priors chosen by researchers, which lead to different measurement error estimates(Kapteyn and Ypma, 2007;Abowd and Stinson, 2013;Jenkins and Rios-Avila, 2020). See alsoGottschalk and Huynh (2010),Hyslop andTownsend (2020), andAdriaans et al (2020).© 2022 The Authors. Review of Income and Wealth published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.…”

Assessing dissimilarity of employment history information from survey and administrative data using sequence analysis techniques

“…These efforts have focused on increasing the accuracy of interviewee characteristics such as educational attainment (e.g. Adriaans et al 2020) and income (e.g. Kreiner et al 2015;Valet et al 2019), counteracting the recall bias of isolated life-course events such as retirement (Korbmacher 2014), or decreasing the measurement error associated with entire dimensions of the life course such as union histories (Kreyenfeld and Bastin 2016) and employment biographies (e.g.…”