Volume 33, Number 1 (Spring) 1998: Attrition in Longitudinal Surveys
Falaris, Evangelos M., and H. Elizabeth Peters. 1998. "Survey Attrition and Schooling Choices." Journal of Human Resources 33(2):531-554.
We use data from three cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of
Labor Market Experience and from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to study the effect of
survey attrition on estimates of statistical models of schooling choices. We estimate
regressions using data on people who always respond to the surveys (stayers) and on people
who miss some surveys (attritors) and test whether the same statistical model describes
the behavior of stayers and attritors. In general (with a few exceptions) we find that
attrition either has no effect on the regression estimates or only affects the estimates
of the intercept (and sometimes the coefficients of birth year dummies) and does not
affect estimates of family background slope coefficients.
Evangelos M. Falaris is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the Univervity of Delaware; H. Elizabeth Peters is an associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. The authors thank Steven Sandell, participants at the 1994 conference on Attrition in Longitudinal Surveys, and a referee for their comments. The authors acknowledge the excellent research assistance of Suzanne Eshleman, Lisa Gennetian, and Debra Pearson. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning July 1, 1998 until June 30, 2001 from Evangelos Falaris, Department of Economics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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