A Practical Proactive Proposal for Dealing with Attrition: Alternative Approaches and an Empirical Example

John DiNardo, Jordan Matsudaira, Justin McCrary and Lisa Sanbonmatsu

Journal of Labor Economics, 2021, vol. 39, issue S2, S507 - S541

Abstract: Survey nonresponse and attrition undermine the validity of many and possibly most econometric estimates. We propose that survey administrators and evaluators proactively create an instrument for observation, for example, by ex ante randomizing participants to differing intensity of follow-up. We illustrate how to apply our proposed methodology using a carefully conducted randomized controlled trial, the Moving to Opportunity demonstration project, which de facto randomly assigned a subset of subjects to more intensive follow-up. The approach yields treatment effect estimates similar to the unbiased estimator based on complete administrative data and has narrower confidence intervals than alternative bounding approaches.

Date: 2021
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