The contribution and potential of data harmonization for cross-national comparative research

Abstract

The promise of empirical evidence to inform policy makers about their population's health, wealth, employment and economic well being has propelled governments to invest in the harmonization of country-specific micro-data over the last 25 years. We review the major data harmonization projects launched over this period. These projects include the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF), the Consortium of Household Panels for European Socio-Economic Research (CHER), the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We discuss their success in providing reliable data for policy analysis and how they are being used to answer policy questions. While there have been some notable failures, on the whole these harmonization efforts have proven to be of major value to the research community and to policy makers.

Acknowledgements

We thank Joachim Frick, Arie Kapetyn, Robert Walker, and Robert Willis for comments. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the twentieth anniversary of the SOEP in Berlin, Germany in 2003 and at the 2004 fall conference of the Association for Public Policy and Management in Atlanta, GA.

Notes

1. Examples include the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the German Socio-Economic Panel, the British Household Panel Study, the Malaysian Family Life Surveys, and the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Study.

2. Examples include the National Child Development Study in Great Britain, the Health and Retirement Survey in the United States, and the English Longitudinal Study on Ageing.

3. A third harmonization effort that is no longer being updated is the EPAG (European Panel Analysis Group) dataset. It includes data from the BHPS, SOEP, and the Socio-Economic Panel (SEP) of the Netherlands. EPAG is also modeled on the SOEP and like the CNEF and CHER, primarily harmonizes data on income and employment (see http://www.irc.essex.ac.uk/epag/dataset.php).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard V. Burkhauser

Richard V. Burkhauser is the Sarah Gibson Blanding Professor of Policy Analysis in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University and a Research Professor at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin, Germany. He has published widely on the effects of social security and welfare policies on the behavior and economic well-being of vulnerable populations. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Dean R. Lillard

Dean Lillard received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1991. He has been a member of the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University since 1991 and is currently Senior Research Associate and Project Manager for the Cross-National Equivalent File project. He is a member of the American Economics Association, the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth, the Association for Public Policy and Management, the Population Association of America, the American Educational Research Association and a Research Associate at the DIW.