Administrative Microdata Research Articles

Imputing consumption from income and wealth information

We investigate the feasibility of deriving a measure of total expenditure at the household level from administrative micro-data on income and wealth. We use Danish administrative data that provides measures of disposable income and the holding of different assets at the end of the year. The ability to link the households in the 1994-6 Danish Expenditure Survey to their administrative data for the years around the survey year offers a unique possibility for constructing a measure of total expenditure and of checking directly on the reliability of the imputation. The results are promising.

Is Workers' Compensation a Substitute for Unemployment Insurance?

This paper examines how the Workers' Compensation (WC) and Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs interact to influence the duration of claims due to workplace accidents. We use longitudinal WC administrative micro-data on more than 30,000 workers in the Canadian construction industry for the period 1976–1986. For the estimations, we use the Meyer (1990) semi-parametric proportional hazard model. Our results show, in particular, that a reduction in the UI replacement ratio is associated with an increase in the duration of claims due to severe accidents that are difficult to diagnose. Moreover, the duration of spells on WC is much higher when an accident occurs in December, a month which corresponds to the beginning of the lay-off season in the construction sector. This result is consistent with the fact that WC benefits are more generous than UI benefits in Canada.

The incidence of non-return among foreign students in the United States

This article presents a comprehensive concenptual and empirical analysis of non-return among foreign students in the United States. Non-return rates are constructed for 69 source countries using administrative microdata from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (various years). The conceptual analysis extends the Roy-model formulation of Borjas (1987, 1992) to the return decision of the foreign student. The empirical analysis finds that the variation in non-return rates across source countries is explained by differences in economic and political conditions in the source countries. The article also reports indirect evidence of skill sorting among foreign students who stay in the United States.