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

Producción científica: Article › revisión exhaustiva

Resumen

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.

Idioma original	English
Número de artículo	112901
Publicación	Economics Letters
Volumen	264
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2026.112901
Estado	Published - may 2026

Nota bibliográfica

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/

Financiación

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.

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

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Finance
Economics and Econometrics

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10.1016/j.econlet.2026.112901

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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

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