The paper analyses the sources of income measurement error in surveys with a
unique data set. We use the Austrian 2008-2011 waves of the European Union "Statistics on
income and living conditions" survey which provide individual information on wages, pensions
and unemployment benefits from survey interviews and officially linked administrative records.
Thus, we do not have to fall back on complex two-sample matching procedures like related
studies. We empirically investigate four sources of measurement error, namely social desirabil-
ity, sociodemographic characteristics of the respondent, the survey design and the presence
of learning effects. We find strong evidence for a social desirability bias in income reporting,
whereas the presence of learning effects is mixed and depends on the type of income under
consideration. An Owen value decomposition reveals that social desirability is a major expla-
nation of misreporting in wages and pensions, whereas sociodemographic characteristics are
most relevant for mismatches in unemployment benefits.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:7005 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Angel, Stefan, Disslbacher, Franziska, Humer, Stefan, Schnetzer, Matthias |
| Publisher | Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of the Royal Statistical Society |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) |
| Relation | https://doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12463, https://www.wiley.com/en-at, http://epub.wu.ac.at/7005/ |
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