Survey Non-response and Unemployment Duration

Gerard van den Berg, Maarten Lindeboom () and Peter Dolton

No 04-094/3, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: Social surveys are often used to estimate unemployment duration distributions. Survey non-response may then cause a bias. We study this by using a data set that combines survey information of individual workers with administrative records of the same workers. The latter provide information on durations of unemployment and personal characteristics of all survey respondents and non-respondents. We develop a method to distinguish empirically between two explanations for a bias in results based on only survey data: selectivity due to related unobserved determinants of durations of unemployment and non-response and a causal effect of a job exit on non-response. The latter may occur even in fully homogeneous populations. The methodology exploits variation in the timing of the duration outcome relative to the survey moment. The results show evidence for both explanations. We discuss implications for standard methods to deal with non-response bias.

This discussion paper has resulted in a publication in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A . (2006, 169(3), 585-604.)

Keywords: non-response bias; unemployment measurement; hazard rate; sample selection; event history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-08-26
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/04094.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Survey non-response and unemployment duration (2004)
Working Paper: Survey Non-Response and Unemployment Duration (2004)
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:tin:wpaper:20040094

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().