Consumption Imputation Errors in Administrative Data
研究了行政数据中推算消费的测量误差，发现其经济意义较小，并讨论了减少误差的稳健性检验和计量方法。
Abstract Many research papers in household finance utilize annual snapshots of household wealth from administrative data, such as tax registries, to calculate “imputed consumption.” However, trading costs, unobserved intrayear trades, or unobserved security characteristics may cause measurement error. We document how such errors vary across groups of individuals by income, portfolio characteristics, and wealth and how they are correlated with individual income and balance sheets, asset prices, and the business cycle using transaction-level retail brokerage account data. We find that the economic significance of imputation error is small in many research settings, and we discuss robustness checks and econometric specifications to minimize the impact of imputation error in future research. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.