Difficulty to Reach Respondents and Nonresponse Bias: Evidence from Large Government Surveys

43 Pages Posted: 7 Apr 2016 Last revised: 17 Jan 2018

See all articles by Ori Heffetz

Ori Heffetz

Cornell University - S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management; Cornell SC Johnson College of Business; The Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Department of Economics and Center for Rationality; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Daniel Reeves

Capital One Bank

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: December 20, 2017

Abstract

How high is unemployment? How low is labor force participation? Is obesity more prevalent among men? How large are household expenditures? We study the sources of the relevant official statistics --- the Current Population Survey (CPS), the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), and the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) --- and find that the answers depend on whether we look at easy- or at difficult-to-reach respondents, measured by the number of call and visit attempts made by interviewers. A challenge to the (conditionally-)random-nonresponse assumption, these findings empirically substantiate the theoretical warning against making population-wide estimates from surveys with low response rates.

Keywords: nonresponse bias, selection bias, survey data, difficulty of reaching, contact attempts, number of calls, paradata

JEL Classification: C18, C83, J60, I18

Suggested Citation

Heffetz, Ori and Reeves, Daniel, Difficulty to Reach Respondents and Nonresponse Bias: Evidence from Large Government Surveys (December 20, 2017). Review of Economics and Statistics, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2758787 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2758787

Ori Heffetz (Contact Author)

Cornell University - S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management ( email )

324 Sage Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
United States

Cornell SC Johnson College of Business ( email )

Ithaca, NY 14850
United States

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Department of Economics and Center for Rationality

Mount Scopus
Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91905
Israel

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.nber.org/~heffetz

Daniel Reeves

Capital One Bank ( email )

6890 Elm Street
McLean, VA 22101
United States

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
242
Abstract Views
2,029
Rank
221,700
PlumX Metrics