Revisiting Sample Bias in the UK's Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, with Implications for Estimates of Low Pay and the Bite of the National Living Wage

John Forth, Alex Bryson, Van Phan (), Felix Ritchie (), Carl Singleton, Lucy Stokes () and Damian Whittard
Additional contact information
Van Phan: University of the West of England, Bristol
Felix Ritchie: University of the West of England, Bristol
Lucy Stokes: Competition and Markets Authority

No 17291, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) is based on an annual one per cent sample of employee jobs and provides many of the UK's official earnings statistics. These statistics are generated using official weights designed to make the achieved sample in each year representative of the population of employee jobs in Britain by gender, age, occupation, and region. However, we find that jobs in small, young, private-sector organisations remain under-represented after weighting. Additionally, there is evidence of systematic year-to-year longitudinal attrition among employees who remain in scope, for which no official weighting adjustment exists. We develop new weights to address these issues, demonstrating their importance through policy-relevant examples. Our new estimates suggest that the bite of the National Living Wage is greater, and that progress toward the target for eradicating low pay has been faster, than previously understood.

Keywords: earnings; non-response bias; attrition; survey weighting; low pay; national living wage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C83 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ipr and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17291.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:iza:izadps:dp17291

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().