期刊名称：Documents de Travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne
印刷版ISSN：1955-611X
出版年度：2017
出版社：Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne
摘要：The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Condition (EU-SILC) database is increasinglyused in demographic analysis, due to its large country coverage, the availability of harmonizedsocioeconomic measures and the possibility to merge partners. However, so far there exists nocomprehensive analysis of the representativeness of fertility behavior reported by EU-SILC. Thispaper quantifies the quality of fertility measures in EU-SILC. We compare several fertility measuresobtained with EU-SILC to unbiased measures from the Human Fertility Database (HFD) for severalEuropean countries, by applying a longitudinal as well as a cross-sectional perspective. We show thatEU-SILC underestimates completed fertility mainly because the questionnaire does not ask about thenumber of children ever born to a woman/man, and we identify significant socioeconomicdifferentials in this measurement bias. Measures of periodic fertility behavior are biased downwardmainly due to attrition, while births of order one for ages 20-29 are particularly underreported.However, we find no evidence for socio-economic differentials in attrition. Our results suggest thatfor the majority of European countries, EU-SILC can be used for demographic analysis whenrespecting the measures of precaution mentioned in this article. These contain for example applyinga retrospective approach and differentiating by rotation groups when calculating aggregatemeasures of periodic fertility differentiated by socio-economic groups.
