Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) asbl 17, rue des PommiersL-2343 Luxembourg –City

Tél : +(352) 26 00 30 20 Email : kruten@lisproject.orgFax: +(352) 26 00 30 30 Web : www.lisproject.org

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) asbl

Thierry KrutenKruten@lisproject.org

Luxembourg, 26-27 October 2006

OECD Conference: Assessing the feasibility of micro-data access

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)Who are we ?

• A Research center and Microdata archive founded in 1983 by a team of multidisciplinary researchers in Europe (Lee Rainwater and Robert Erickson)

• Governed by an international board of advisers, who represent our participating countries. We are financed by the participating countries, with supplemental funding from the Luxembourg government

• Directed by Janet Gornick, a political economist and sociologist based in the NYC (USA), and Markus Jantti, an economist in Finland

• 8 Staff persons (50% researchers and 50% statisticians)

1. to promote comparative research on the economic and social wellbeing of populations across countries

2. to harmonize cross-national microdata, thus relieving researchers of this task, relying on an expert staff that carries out the harmonization work and provides support services for users

3. to provide a method allowing researchers to access these data under privacy restrictions required by the countries providing the data

4. to create a system that quickly allows research requests to be received and results returned to users at remote locations

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)Four Goals …

The main work is to collect, harmonize, and make accessible household microdata to the Social Sciences Research Community in order to achieve

four objectives

• to answer complex questions addressed by Researchers and Policy-makers but unsolved by macroeconomics statistics (e.g. role of income sources such as means-tested transfers in the economic well-being of individuals and household or marginal effect of income benefits on labor market participation from a gender perspective)

• to allow the users to eliminate many of the potential sources of non-comparability achieved by the process of LISsification (data harmonization) by which variables are constructed according to a common template

We are committed to easy the access to microdata, both technically and administratively

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)…to do what ?

A major investment of ressources and, above all, of time …

Wave II around 1985

Wave I around 1980

Historical database

Wave V around 2000

Wave IV around 1995

Wave III around 1990

150 datasets from30 countries

From Europe, North America, Australasia, the Middle East and

Asia

• LIS completed a comprehensive internal review of its data template and harmonization rules in order to improve the quality of the LIS data (available by January 2007)

• Expansion of LIS is a constant priority: NZ, Korea …

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)A huge databank

New Projects have been launched to face new challenges in the Social Science field

Wealth data project

• Development of an internationally comparable micro-database on wealth including comparable measures of net worth and its components

• available for public access, via remote access, as of late 2007

LIS’s main priority over the next five years

• is to substantially increase the inclusion of middle-income countries add microdata from Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Indonesia, and South Africa

• Initial step : Project in collaboration with the World Bank

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)Still in expansion

User Support services (even transparent)

• Secure agreements with all of the data provider (e.g. national statistical offices)

• Help desk providing users with assistance on any type of query (from registration to coding issues)

• Ensure that confidentiality rules are compliant with any specific country legislation applying appropriate technologies and admnistrative procedures

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)A variety of support services ….

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)The Scope

Documentation

Data access

Available data

Micro-data from household surveys on

• Generic information on the household (composition, geographic, tenure status etc…)

• Main socio-demographic characteristics of household members (demographic, education, marital status)

• Detailed breakdown of household income and some individual income variables

• An extensive set of labour market data

• Some items of household expenditure

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)who gets access to microdata ?

• Use of the data is restricted to social science research purposes only. No private or commercial use is permitted

• Access is limited to Researchers working for an academic (Ph.D. Students & Undergraduate Students), government or non-profit organization research departments

• Researchers in countries that contribute financially are invited to use the data for free, without limit. In countries that do not participate financially, we charge researchers a user fee. But graduate students, regardless of their country affiliation, receive free access

Documentation

Data access

Available data

Documentation

Data access

Available data

• Secured remote access to LIS datasets• Users have to register with the LIS and sign a

confidentiality pledge in which they describe the objectives of their research

• Registered users then receive a personal user account and a password and have access to LIS databases

• Fully automated systems running 24 hours a day,7 days a week

LISSYUsers send via e-mail statistical requests

WEB TABULATORUsers directly create cross-tabs through a secure Internet interface

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)How do they access microdata ?

• Users submit their job requests by "emailing" the requests via the INTERNET using one of the statistical software packages available (SAS, SPSS, STATA)

• LISSY will automatically process jobs and return the standard SPSS, SAS or STATA listings to the e-mail address given during the registration process

• The database cannot be downloaded and direct access to the microdata is not possible

LISSY

Documentation

Data access

Available data

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)The Lissy System

• Create tables with the Tabulation Wizard (dataset, dimensions, contents)

• View tables

• Export results to an external file (e.g, Excel)

• Online web tabulating service to design and create tables derived from underlying LIS datasets through a secure Internet interface

• User-friendly interface: no need for knowledge of statistical packages

• At the moment: Reduced set of countries, variables and time-frame

Access

Functions

Documentation

Data access

Available data

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)The Web Tabulator

• Surveys can differ quite substantially from country to country or from a year to another

• Allow users to understand the harmonization process and the context in which LIS outcomes should be analyzed. It gives us the possibility to do sensitivity analysis

• LIS documentation is available for public access on-line

• Cross-national comparisons imply providing users with more than figures

Documentation

Data access

Available data

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)LIS documentation

Documentation

Data access

Available data

Parallel to its core function, LIS providesusers with an extensive documentation for each

dataset

• Details technical aspects of the original survey

• Detailed codebook of each variable

• Record of the harmonization process

• Institutional information on tax and transfer programs corresponding to the microdata variables

• Houses a comparative welfare states database and a family policy database. Both contain an array of country-level policy indicators. Often seek by users to link policy variables to micro-level outcomes

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)LIS documentation

• Used by over 1500 researchers in many countries to analyze economic and social policies and their effects on outcomes including poverty, income inequality, employment status, wage patterns, gender inequality, family formation, child-wellbeing, health status, immigration, political behavior and public opinion (books, journal articles and dissertations, and are often featured in the popular media.)

• The LIS has contributed to four major fields of study in the last two decades: refinement of the income concept, proliferation of equivalence scales, conceptualization and measurement of income inequality and poverty, and proper identification of international rankings and trends(Smeeding, Timothy M., guest ed. 2004. Socio-Economic Review. 2 (2) (May). Oxford, UK: Oxford

University Press.)

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)Use and results

After nearly 25 years of years of experience, LIS is a well-known platform for international comparative research

• Throughout these twenty years, particularly in LIS’s second decade, a number of researchers have turned their attention to one particular area of inquiry: women’s economic status and/or economic gender inequality

• LIS-based research has catalyzed changes in national policies—for example, British policy toward children, based on the work of Jonathan Bradshaw (Bradshaw and Chen 1997)— and has informed the United Nations, the OECD, and other major bodies about poverty, inequality, and employment outcomes across countries

• One of the most fruitful uses of LIS is for the study of income distributions across the richest countries of the world, derived from LIS’s Key Figures which focus on income inequality and poverty (Standard methods & statistical programs are available on-line)

• Each completed study is published in the LIS Working Paper series, which currently numbers more than 450 papers (http://www.lisproject.org/publications/)

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)Use and results