Fertility analysis with SILC: a quantification of measurement bias

Aurélien Dasre, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Angela Greulich, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

The aim of this paper is to quantify the potential bias of fertility measures in the European Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). This survey is more and more used in socioeconomic analysis as it provides harmonized measures of socioeconomic variables available for over 30 European countries. However, as an economic survey, it is not directly shaped to ensure a good measurement of demographic variables, in particular of fertility. This results from the fact that in the questionnaire, there is no question on the number of children ever born. By comparing the fertility measures of EU SILC to unbiased measures from the Human Fertility Data Base (HFDB), this paper quantifies the extent to which the missing question on children ever born leads to a systematic underestimation of different fertility measures in SILC. We hereby decompose the bias by age and child rank as well as by socioeconomic categories by applying a longitudinal as well as a cross-sectional perspective.