Where is the missing credit card debt? Clues and implications

Jonathan Zinman, an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College and a visiting scholar with the Payment Cards Center, makes a casual comparison of industry and household data sets which suggests that households underreport credit card borrowing by a factor of three. This paper offers some reassurance and several new stylized facts. Accounting for differences in definitions between household and industry measures reduces debt underreporting to a factor of two. Underreporting is less severe for general-purpose than for other cards. The true underreporting factor has remained stable over the past 15 years, even as 26 million households entered the market. Households report charges and account holding relatively accurately.Credit cards ; Debt

Immigration status and property crime:an application of estimators for underreported outcomes

This paper studies the individual-level relationship between immigration and property crime in England and Wales using crime self-reports from the Crime and Justice Survey. Models that account for underreporting are used, since this is a major concern in crime self-reports. The results indicate that the reported crime is substantially underreported, but if anything, immigrants are less likely to underreport than natives. More importantly, controlling for underreporting and basic demographics, the estimates across all model specifications, although imprecise, indicate that immigration status and property crime are negatively associated. We finally find that the estimated relationship between immigration status and property crime differs across regions and ethnic groups

Underreporting Chargeable Time: A Continuing Problem for Public Accounting Firms

Prior research shows that underreporting chargeable time has been a concern for public accounting firms even though many of these firms have policies and procedures that prohibit eating time. The purpose of this study is to examine the current state of this problem and to provide recommendations to manage the problem more effectively. Practicing public accountants at all professional levels were surveyed to determine the extent, opportunity, ethical perception and perceived benefits of underreporting time. The results show that although the majority of the respondents believe underreporting time is unethical, the majority of them did not report all of their chargeable hours in the prior year. The main reasons for such behavior stem from the desire to: (1) receive better periodic performance evaluations, (2) be viewed as competent by superiors and (3) receive promotions

Deception and Misreporting in a Social Program

We investigate empirically the extent of misreporting in a poverty-alleviation program in which self-reported information, followed by a household visit, is used to determine eligibility. Underreporting may be due to a deception motive, and overreporting to an embarrassment motive. We find that underreporting of goods and desirable home characteristics is widespread, and that overreporting is common with respect to goods linked to social status. Larger program benefits encourage underreporting and discourage overreporting. The effect of benefits on underreporting is significant under a variety of specifications. We also investigate the effects of education and gender on misreporting.

Measuring true sales and underreporting with matched firm-level survey and tax-office data

This paper uses firm-level survey data matched with official tax records to estimate the unobserved true sales of formal firms in Mongolia. Taking into account firm-level incentives to comply with taxes and a production function technology linking unobserved true sales with observable firm-level production characteristics, the authors derive a multiple-indicators, multiple-causes model predicting unobserved true sales. Comparing predicted true sales with sales reported to the tax office, the analysis finds that 38.6 percent of firm-level sales are underreported. It also finds evidence that firm-level survey data suffer from significant underreporting. Finally, the paper compares this approach with two alternative approaches to measuring underreporting by firms.Taxation&Subsidies,Microfinance,Emerging Markets,Economic Theory&Research,Debt Markets

Income underreporting based on income expenditure gaps: Survey vs tax records

We estimate the extent of income underreporting among working households, using data from an income survey linked with individual tax records for Estonia. Income underreporting is inferred from consumption propensities, following and extending the method by Pissarides andWeber (1989). Our dataset allows us to assess the validity of the key assumption in related studies that survey income corresponds to income reported to the tax authority. Our results show large underreporting of earnings by the self-employed and also substantial underreporting of earnings by private sector employees on the basis of register income, while a much smaller scale of non-compliance is detected for self-employed and no underreporting for private employees using survey incomes. This suggests that previous studies applying this methodology to survey data have underestimated the extent of non-compliance

Decreasing Inequality Under Latin America's "Social Democratic" and " Populist" Govenments: Is the Difference Real?

This paper addresses the claim that the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, Latin America's so-called "left-populist" governments, have failed to effectively reduce inequality in the 2000s and have only benefitted from high commodity prices and other benign external conditions. In particular, it examines the econometric evidence presented by McLeod and Lustig (2011) that the "social democratic" governments of Brazil, Chile and Uruguay were more successful and finds that their original results are highly sensitive to the use of data from the Socioeconomic Database for Latin America and the Caribbean (SEDLAC). Conducting the same analysis using data on income inequality from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) leads to the exact opposite result: it is the so-called "left-populist" governments who appear to have effectively reduced income inequality over the last decade. The key difference between data from SEDLAC and ECLAC is that the latter corrects for income underreporting -- when households in an income survey underreport their true amount of income, thus biasing the measurement of inequality -- while the former does not. Absent reasonable criteria for choosing one dataset over the other, the paper suggests that any econometric results based on income inequality data should prove robust to both sources

A Bayesian Framework for Parameter Estimation in Dynamical Models with Applications to Forecasting

Mathematical models in Biology are powerful tools for the study and exploration of complex dynamics. Nevertheless, bringing theoretical results to an agreement with experimental observations involves acknowledging a great deal of uncertainty intrinsic to our theoretical representation of a real system.
Proper handling of such uncertainties, is key to the successful usage of models to predict experimental or field observations. This problem has been addressed over the years by many tools for model calibration an parameter estimation. In this article we present a general framework for uncertainty analysis and parameter estimation which is designed to handle uncertainties associated with the modeling of dynamic biological systems while remaining agnostic as to the type of model used. We apply the framework to two Influenza transmission models: one deterministic and the other stochastic. The results show that the framework can be applied without modifications to the two types of models and that it performs equally well on both. We also discuss the application of the framework to calibrate models for forecasting purposes.
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Understanding the hospital sharps injury reporting pathway

INTRODUCTION: Patient-care workers are frequently exposed to sharps injuries, which can involve the risk of serious illness. Underreporting of these injuries can compromise prevention efforts. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We linked survey responses of 1572 non-physician patient-care workers with the Occupational Health Services (OHS) database at two academic hospitals. We determined whether survey respondents who said they had sharps injuries indicated that they had reported them and whether reported injuries were recorded in the OHS database. RESULTS: Respondents said that they reported 62 of 78 sharps injuries occurring over a 12-month period. Only 28 appeared in the OHS data. Safety practices were positively associated with respondents’ saying they reported sharps injuries but not with whether reported injuries appeared in the OHS data. CONCLUSIONS: Administrators should consider creating reporting mechanisms that are simpler and more direct. Administrators and researchers should attempt to understand how incidents might be lost before they are recorded