Estimating parameters of the income distribution in public-use micro datasets
is frequently complicated by multiple sources of survey error. This dissertation
consists of three main chapters that, taken together, provide insight
into several important econometric concerns that arise when analysing income
from household surveys. The country of interest is South Africa, but
despite this geographical specificity, the discussion in each chapter is generalisable
to any household survey concerned with measuring any component
of income.
Chapter One introduces the dissertation. Chapter Two develops a framework
for investigating micro data quality that is a guide for researchers working
with public-use datasets that often have poor information about the survey
quality control process. It is largely based on adapting the total survey
error framework to shed light on which aspects of data quality researchers
can observe and do something about. The framework is then utilised to
investigate the evolution of data quality in Statistics South Africa’s labour
market household surveys from the early 1990s to 2007.