Identifying couples in administrative data

Identifizierung von Ehepaaren in Administrativen Daten

Deborah Goldschmidt, Wolfram Klosterhuber and Johannes Schmieder
Additional contact information
Deborah Goldschmidt: Analysis Group
Wolfram Klosterhuber: IAB

Journal for Labour Market Research, 2017, vol. 50, issue 1, 29-43

Abstract: Abstract We develop a new method for identifying married couples in administrative data. Using address and name data from the universe of employment records in Germany we find around 3.3 Mio. pairs of individuals who are living at the same location, have a matching last name and are less than 15 years apart in age. We show supporting evidence that around 89 to 94% of these pairs are indeed married couples and provide careful consistency checks. Using information from the German Microcensus, we show that our method identifies about 17% of all married couples in Germany and about 35% of couples where both spouses are in social security covered jobs or unemployed. In ongoing work this couple identifier will be made available to the research community and users for the IAB administrative data. Our method thus opens the door for household level analyses benefiting from the precision and very large number of observations available in administrative data.

Keywords: Couples; Geocoding; Administrative data; Household analysis; J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12651-017-0218-4 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Identifying couples in administrative data (2017)
Working Paper: Identifying couples in administrative data (2014)
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:spr:jlabrs:v:50:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s12651-017-0218-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12651

DOI: 10.1007/s12651-017-0218-4

Access Statistics for this article

Journal for Labour Market Research is currently edited by Joachim Möller

More articles in Journal for Labour Market Research from Springer, Institute for Employment Research/ Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().