Measuring non-response bias in a cross-country enterprise survey

Sebastien Perez-Duarte, Katarzyna Bańkowska and Małgorzata Osiewicz

No 12, Statistics Paper Series from European Central Bank

Abstract: Non-response is a common issue affecting the vast majority of surveys, and low non-response is usually associated with higher quality. However, efforts to convince unwilling respondents to participate in a survey might not necessarily result in a better picture of the target population. It can lead to higher, rather than lower, non-response bias, for example if incentives are effective only for particular groups, e.g. in a business survey, if the incentives tend to attract mainly larger companies or enterprises encountering financial difficulties. We investigate the impact of non-response in the European Commission and European Central Bank Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE), which collects evidence on the financing conditions faced by European small and medium-sized enterprises compared with those of large firms. This survey, which has been conducted by telephone biannually since 2009 by the European Central Bank and the European Commission, provides a valuable means of searching for this kind of bias, given the high heterogeneity of response propensities across countries. The study relies on so-called JEL Classification: C81, C83, D22

Keywords: bias; business survey; non-response; R-indicators; representativity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ecb.europa.eu//pub/pdf/scpsps/ecbsp12.en.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecb:ecbsps:201512

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Statistics Paper Series from European Central Bank 60640 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Official Publications ().