U.S. Participation in the Development of a Transnational Database on Family Income

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9321507 Smeeding The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) is an international consortium with a membership of 20 nations located in Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Australia. These countries, via their respective funding organizations, cooperatively support a research center in Luxembourg that standardizes and makes available household-based microdata on incomes for representative samples of member nations' populations. These data are used by over 260 researchers worldwide to analyze economic and social policy structure and its effect on such topics as income structure, poverty and income inequality and wage and earnings differences. Researchers can access the data on-site, or via a computerized telecommunications network. Funds provided by the National Science Foundation constitute United States participation in the consortium. The full cooperation of all member nations is required in order to guarantee feasibility of data retrieval, maintenance of high standards of data quality, and gradual relaxation of methodological constraints on certain types of data analysis. National Science Foundation funds not only represent U.S. cooperation in the enterprise, they also assure U.S. involvement in all important developmental decisions as well as helping to offset the cost of database maintenance and update. ***