We assess the quality of the HRS’s measures of out-of-pocket medical spending and health insurance premia, both in the “core interviews” and in the “exit interview” data. We provide detailed evidence on the quality of the HRS insurance premia data, and we compare the HRS exit data to exit data in the MCBS. We document how changes in survey questions, including the introduction of “unfolding brackets,” affect the HRS measures. We document what we believe are errors in the HRS imputations and provide some suggestions for improving the accuracy of some imputed variables. Overall, we find the HRS data to be of high quality. However, we believe that many interesting variables in the HRS are under-utilized because users must perform imputations themselves.
Authors

CPP Co-Director
Eric is the Montague Burton Professor of Industrial Relations and Labour Economics at the University of Cambridge and Professor of Economics at UCL.

John Bailey Jones

Research Associate University of Bristol
Jeremy is a Research Associate at IFS and an Assistant Professor at the University of Bristol with particular interest in public economics and health.
Journal article details
- DOI
- 10.1515/fhep-2017-0001
- Publisher
- De Gruyter
- Issue
- Volume Forthcoming, October 2017
Suggested citation
J, Bailey Jones and E, French and J, McCauley. (2017). 'The accuracy of economic measurement in the health and retirement study' Forthcoming(2017)
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