EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Estimating the Impacts of Program Benefits: Using Instrumental Variables with Underreported and Imputed Data

Melvin Stephens and Takashi Unayama

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2019, vol. 101, issue 3, 468-475

Abstract: Survey nonresponse has risen in recent years, which has increased the share of imputed and underreported values found on commonly used data sets. While this trend has been well documented for earnings, the growth in nonresponse to government transfers questions has received far less attention. We demonstrate analytically that the underreporting and imputation of transfer benefits can lead to program impact estimates that are substantially overstated when using instrumental variables methods to correct for endogeneity or measurement error in benefit amounts. We document the importance of failing to account for these issues using two empirical examples.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest_a_00769 (application/pdf)
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Estimating the Impacts of Program Benefits: Using Instrumental Variables with Underreported and Imputed Data (2015) Downloads
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:tpr:restat:v:101:y:2019:i:3:p:468-475

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:101:y:2019:i:3:p:468-475