ERRORS IN SURVEY REPORTS OF EARNINGS, HOURS WORKED, AND HOURLY WAGES

Using administrative records on earnings, hours worked, and hourly wag es for hourly employees of a single manufacturing firm, we found stand ard assumptions about errors in survey measures to be violated to vary ing extents. Errors are correlated with true scores, and errors in rep orts of earnings and hours in different periods are generally positive ly correlated with one another, particularly for reports given in a si ngle interview. Although a high proportion of reporting errors are fro m an approximately normal distribution, a small proportion comes from a distribution with a much greater variance, and these cases often hav e considerable influence on estimates of relationships between variabl es.