Introduction to theJHR’sSpecial Issue on Cross-National Comparative Research Using Panel Surveys

Abstract

Until recently, international comparative research had a poor reputation, especially in economics. Comparative international research was seen as overly descriptive and typically based on simple contrasts of aggregate national statistics. When cross-sectional microdata were used, the surveys that did exist in many countries did not contain the range and depth of variables to which the scientific research community had become accustomed. Part of this bad reputation also stemmed from the fact that, using the United States as the benchmark, comparable panel surveys either did not exist in many countries or were viewed as being of much lower quality. The end result was that scholars from all countries would tend to test their models only using the best U.S. data. It was also felt by many foreign scholars that unless they used U.S. panel data they would have great difficulty in publishing in the betterknown scientific journals. We believe that a combination of circumstances is about to radically change this situation. These circumstances start by recognizing that comparative international research has some unique analytical advantages for testing the effects of important policies common to many countries. In addition, the number and quality of international panel surveys are improving rapidly and in many dimensions will exceed those of their U.S. counterparts. Finally, many of the best graduate students trained in U.S. institutions were foreign nationals who are now some of the leading scholars in the best U.S. departments. It is not surprising that these scholars would want to test their ideas using data from their home countries. With this in mind, a conference on comparative research using international panel surveys was held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on October 26 and 27, 2000. The conference was intended as a vehicle to encourage researchers in the social sciences to use panel surveys to address critical scientific and policy issues that would be better informed by international comparisons and the variation in policy environments across countries. The topics of interest for this conference spanned substantive and methodological issues relevant to the social sciences and that make use of unique features of specific longitudinal data sets in a cross-national context. This conference was sponsored by the Board of Overseers of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the Technical Review Committee of the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS), and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Funding was