Abstract
The retrospectively recalled calendar of activities in the European Community Household Panel is a prime resource for cross-country analysis of unemployment experience. We investigate the reliability of these data and find that 26 % of unemployed respondents misreported retrospectively their unemployment status in the subsequent interview. We observe large differences across countries: While the conditional probability of consistent information is 96 % in the UK, it is just 51 % in Greece for a comparable individual. By analyzing long-term unemployment and unemployment persistence, we show that the results of cross-country comparisons are strongly affected by these data problems.
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Notes
Cognitive and social psychology provide some guidance for understanding under what circumstances survey responses are likely to be unreliable. Bound et al. (2001) discuss the main lessons of this literature from the viewpoint of economics.
The same issue arises also in other validation studies; see for example Jürges (2007).
The unit non-response rate is defined as 1 minus the ratio of the number of completed interviews to the number of attempted interviews by country. The attrition rate is defined as the share of individuals still in the sample in the last wave who appeared in the panel at least once between the years 1996 and 2001.
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Acknowledgments
The ECHP UDB data for waves 1994–2001 were provided by European Commission, Eurostat, which bears no responsibility for the results or conclusions drawn by the authors. We thank Marjo Pyy-Martikainen for her comments and help with the data and Annette Jäckle and Kimberly Fisher for their comments. Tomi Kyyrä acknowledges financial support from the Academy of Finland, Grant 133930, and Ralf Wilke from the Economic and Social Research Council, Grant RES-061-25-0059.
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Kyyrä, T., Wilke, R.A. On the reliability of retrospective unemployment information in European household panel data. Empir Econ 46, 1473–1493 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-013-0718-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-013-0718-1