Errors in survey and administrative data on employment earnings: Austria and the United Kingdom compared

Christopher R. Bollinger; Stephen P. Jenkins; Fernando Rios-Avila; Iva V. Tasseva

doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2026.112901

Errors in survey and administrative data on employment earnings: Austria and the United Kingdom compared

Christopher R. Bollinger
, Stephen P. Jenkins
, Fernando Rios-Avila
, Iva V. Tasseva

Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

We contribute new cross-national evidence about the nature of measurement errors in employment earnings, fitting the same error components models to harmonised earnings data for Austria and the UK. For both countries, there is evidence that administrative data contain measurement errors in addition to linkage errors, and there is no mean reversion in survey measurement errors.

Original language	English
Article number	112901
Journal	Economics Letters
Volume	264
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2026.112901
State	Published - May 2026

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2026 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Funding

We thank Statistics Austria and the UK Department for Work and Pensions for making their confidential linked datasets available to us, and the handling Editor (Brendan Kline) and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. This paper was initially drafted when Jenkins was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Economics, European University Institute.

Funders
Department for Work and Pensions
Department of Agricultural Economics
European University Institute

Keywords

Administrative data
C81
C83
D31
Earnings
Finite mixture models
Linkage error
Linked survey data
Measurement error

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Finance
Economics and Econometrics

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10.1016/j.econlet.2026.112901

Cite this

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abstract = "We contribute new cross-national evidence about the nature of measurement errors in employment earnings, fitting the same error components models to harmonised earnings data for Austria and the UK. For both countries, there is evidence that administrative data contain measurement errors in addition to linkage errors, and there is no mean reversion in survey measurement errors.",

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Errors in survey and administrative data on employment earnings: Austria and the United Kingdom compared

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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