Re: st: how to fill some gross wage missings if I have the net wage

["Laura R." <laura.roh@googlemail.com>]

Thank you for your comment, Prof. Jenkins. At first one might think
that if one has the net income and some other variables about the
workplace and marital status and so on, it should be easy to fill the
gaps in the gross wage.

I am currently experimenting with -ice- but will keep your suggestions in mind.

LR

2010/12/17 Stephen P. Jenkins <stephenj@essex.ac.uk>:
>> > On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Laura R.
> <laura.roh@googlemail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >> for some reason, I would like to use the gross wage for my
>> estimations. However,
>> >> - only 30% of respondents have given both net and gross wage,
> while
>> >> - 70% of respondents have only given their net wage.
>> >> These data are all from the same country and therefore underlying
> the
>> >> same tax laws. So on the basis those who gave both gross and net
> wage
>> >> and with the help of the net wage of those where the gross wage
> is
>> >> missing, can I impute the missing gross wages? If so, how could I
>> >> implement this in Stata?
> -------------------------------------
>
> Please do not under-estimate the magnitude of the problems involved in
> getting gross --> net and net --> gross calculations correct.  You
> should be aware that large amounts of resources are devoted to this
> task by statistical agencies and research organisations.
>
> For Europe, read e.g. documentation from Eurostat concerning the
> European Community Household Panel and, more recently, the Statistics
> on Income and Living Conditions.  There is also the EUROMOD project
> which is a multi-country tax-benefit micro-simulation model (Google
> will find references).
>
> There are of course US counterparts, and Austin Nichols was drawing on
> those in his response to you. The NBER have a tax-benefit calculator
> too (note the Statalist correspondence with Daniel Feenberg in recent
> days).  As the correspondence indicates, what you want to do is a
> potentially very big task. It depends of course on how much complexity
> you want to take account of.
>
> All the standard (non-life cycle) tax-benefit models that I am aware
> of work with cross-sectional data -- panels don't provide additional
> information for the calculations. So, it's a matter of repeating
> calculations for each year in your panel.
>
> Using regression methods to summarize the relationship between gross
> and net income using data from the individuals -- or families ... it
> depends on the tax unit in the country -- is one way to proceed, and I
> think Eurostat have employed a version of that in the past.  But then,
> there are also potential issues of selection (who provides both gross
> and net and who doesn't?)   Maarten Buis was suggesting multiple
> imputation after using a regression approach.  I understand the
> rationale for MI, but I would suggest that there are many big issues
> to address before getting to that -ice-ing on this particular cake.
>
> All in all, don't expect there to be a quick fix.
>
>
> Stephen
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> Professor Stephen P. Jenkins <stephenj@essex.ac.uk>
> Institute for Social and Economic Research
> University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, U.K.
> Tel: +44 1206 873374.  Fax: +44 1206 873151.
> http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk
> Survival Analysis using Stata:
> http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/survival-analysis
> Downloadable papers and software: http://ideas.repec.org/e/pje7.html
>
>
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