Are Household Surveys Like Tax Forms: Evidence from Income Underreporting of the Self Employed
Are Household Surveys Like Tax Forms: Evidence from Income Underreporting of the Self Employed
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DOI：
10.17016/feds.2011.06
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发表时间：
2010-11
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Erik Hurst;Geng Li;B. Pugsley
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Erik Hurst;Geng Li;B. Pugsley
有大量文献表明，个体经营者向税务机关少报了收入。在本文中，我们量化了美国家庭调查中个体经营者系统性低报收入的程度。为此，我们使用描述工资和薪金工人收入与支出之间关系的恩格尔曲线来推断自营职业者的实际收入，从而根据其报告的支出推断其报告缺口。我们发现个体户少报收入约 30%。这个结果在数据源和替代模型规范中都非常稳健。未能解释这种收入少报的情况会导致有偏见的结论。我们在现有的收入差异、财富差异、预防性储蓄、生命周期收入概况以及跨 MSA 的收入变化指标中记录了这种偏差。我们的结果表明，研究人员理所当然地认为个人会向家庭调查提供公正的信息，这是天真的，因为他们倾向于向其他行政来源提供相同信息的扭曲报告。
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 also systematically underreport their income in 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. Failing to account for such income underreporting leads to biased conclusions. We document this bias in existing measures of earnings differentials, wealth differentials, precautionary savings, lifecycle earnings profiles, and earnings variation across MSAs. Our results show that it is naive for researchers to take it for granted that individuals will provide unbiased information to household surveys given their demonstrated tendency of providing distorted reports of the same information to other administrative sources.