U.S. Participation in the Development of a Transnational Database 2004-2007

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The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) project is a consortium of multiple nations which, via their NSF's and other research funders, cooperatively finance a research and data center. Here LIS harmonizes household income microdata sets collected by each nation, and employs electronic mail to make the data available to researchers across the globe. This data is used by over 400 researchers worldwide to analyze economic and social policy and its effect on such topics as regional and group-specific income structures, poverty and income inequality, political support for public policy, voting, fertility, immigration, child-wellbeing, and wage and earnings differentials by education level and by gender. Regular activities such as biennial meetings of sponsoring agencies and annual summer workshops are combined with intermittent conferences based on the database. Currently, twenty-nine nations participate in LIS, with several others (Korea,South Africa, Turkey, Portugal, Greece) in the process of joining. Over 130 data bases are now in LIS, with more being added every month (see www.lisproject.org). LIS has come to be the most respected source of cross-nationally available household income distribution data and related studies extant. And so this proposal for core funding from the US, like the proposals to the other 29 nations, is vital to the future of the LIS project.The plans for the next three years include several improvements in database management (more sophisticated electronic access system; web tabulator access system for non programmers; better on-line documentation, fifth wave of data); in research (inequality, poverty, gender studies, etc.); in training (annual LIS workshops in the United States, in Europe and elsewhere). The research aims include developing better purchasing power parities for income distribution studies; adding a number of developing nations data and making them comparable with rich nations data; expanding the usage of LIS in studies of political economy; measuring effects of low income on child well being; and related subject areas. This project is also beginning a new Luxembourg Wealth Study which is parallel to the LIS but which is based on household wealth surveys in 10 nations.