| 来源类型 | Working Paper |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| DOI | 10.3386/w16527 |
| 来源ID | Working Paper 16527 |
| Are Household Surveys Like Tax Forms: Evidence from Income Underreporting of the Self Employed | |
| Erik Hurst; Geng Li; Benjamin Pugsley | |
| 发表日期 | 2010-11-11 |
| 出版年 | 2010 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | There is a large literature showing that the self employed underreport their income to tax authorities. In this paper, we quantify the extent to which the self employed systematically underreport their income to U.S. household surveys. To do so, we use the Engel curve describing the relationship between income and expenditures of wage and salary workers to infer the actual income, and thus the reporting gap, of the self employed based on their reported expenditures. We find that the self employed underreport their income by about 30 percent. This result is remarkably robust across data sources and alternative model specifications. Aside from transportation expenditures, we find little evidence that the self employed misreport their expenditures to household surveys. We show that failing to account for such income underreporting leads to biased conclusions when comparing the earnings and saving behavior between the self employed and other workers as well as biased estimates of the importance of precautionary savings, the shape of lifecycle earnings profiles, and the magnitude of earnings differences across MSAs. Finally, our results show that it is naive for researchers to take it for granted that individuals will provide unbiased information to household surveys when they are simultaneously providing distorted information to other administrative sources. |
| 主题 | Econometrics ; Data Collection ; Macroeconomics ; Consumption and Investment ; Public Economics ; Taxation ; Labor Economics ; Labor Compensation |
| URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w16527 |
| 来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
| 引用统计 | |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/574202 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Erik Hurst,Geng Li,Benjamin Pugsley. Are Household Surveys Like Tax Forms: Evidence from Income Underreporting of the Self Employed. 2010. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| w16527.pdf（407KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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