Employment misclassification in survey and administrative reports

Dean Hyslop and Wilbur Townsend

No 16_19, Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research

Abstract: This paper analyses measurement error in the classification of employment. We show that the true employment rate and time-invariant error rates can be identified, given access to two measures of employment with independent errors. Empirical identification requires at least two periods of data over which the employment rate varies. We estimate our model using matched survey and administrative data from Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure. We find that both measures have error, with the administrative data being substantially more accurate than the survey data. In both sources, false positives are much more likely than false negatives. Allowing for errors in both sources substantially affects estimated employment rates.

Keywords: Unemployment rate; measurement error; validation study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C18 J21 J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2016-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Employment misclassification in survey and administrative reports (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mtu:wpaper:16_19

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