Читать книгу Administrative Records for Survey Methodology - Группа авторов - Страница 34

The HRS team requests permission from respondents to link their survey responses to other data resources, as described below. For consenting respondents, HRS data are linked at the individual level to administrative records from Social Security and Medicare claims, thus allowing for detailed characterizations of income and wealth over time. Through this, the HRS is linked to at least a dozen other datasets. See Abowd, Schmutte, and Vilhuber (2018) or http://hrsonline.isr.umich.edu/index.php?p=reslis for a more complete list of linked datasets.

The CMS maintain claims records for the medical services received by essentially all Americans age 65 and older and those less than 65 years who receive Medicare benefits. These records include comprehensive information about hospital stays, outpatient services, physician services, home health care, and hospice care. When linked to the HRS interview data, this supplementary information provides far more detail on the health circumstances and medical treatments received by HRS participants than would otherwise be available.

Data from HRS interviews are also linked to information about respondents’ employers. This improves information on employer-provided benefits, including pensions. While most pension-eligible workers have some idea of the benefits available through their pension plans, they generally are not knowledgeable about detailed provisions of the plans. By linking HRS interview data with detailed information on pension plans, researchers can better understand the contribution of the pension to economic circumstances and the effects of the pension structure on work and retirement decisions.

HRS data are also linked at the individual level to administrative records from Social Security and Medicare, Veteran’s Administration, the National Death Index, and employer-provided pension plan information (Sonnega and Weir 2014).