Using Administrative Data to Impute Income Non-Response in Household Surveys

V. Smith, Michael P. Welsh, Richard Carson and Stanley Presser

No 30420, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Income is simultaneously one of the most important variables used by economists and the variable most likely to be missing due to item non-response. While observations that are missing income responses are often dropped from analyses, such treatment is usually inappropriate. More appropriate solutions rely on imputation based on either covariates (e.g., age and education) measured in the survey or on spatial estimates (most often for zip codes) from the American Community Survey. We describe a new spatially-based alternative using publicly available Internal Revenue Service tax data that allows estimates of zip code’s income distribution.

JEL-codes: C0 C8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv and nep-pub
Note: EEE PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30420.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:nbr:nberwo:30420

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30420

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().