Misreporting of government transfers: how important are survey design and geography?

0498863 - NHU-C 2019 eng V - Research Report
Meyer, B. D. - Mittag, Nikolas
Misreporting of government transfers: how important are survey design and geography?.
Bonn: IZA, 2018. 34 s. IZA discussion paper series.
Institutional support: Progres-Q24
Keywords : survey error * administrative data * linked data
Subject RIV: AH - Economics

Recent studies linking household surveys to administrative records reveal high rates of
misreporting of program receipt. We use the FoodAPS survey to examine whether the
findings of these studies of general household surveys using one or two states generalize to
a survey with a narrow focus and across many states. First, we study how reporting errors
differ from other surveys. We find a lower rate of false negatives (failures to report true
receipt) in FoodAPS, likely partly due to the shorter recall period of FoodAPS. Misreporting
varies with household characteristics and between interviewers. Second, we examine
geographic heterogeneity in survey error to assess whether we can extrapolate from linked
data from a few states. We find systematic differences between states in unconditional
error rates but no evidence of substantial differences conditional on common covariates.
Thus, extrapolating error rates across states may yield more accurate receipt estimates than
uncorrected survey estimates.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0291154