Recall Error in the Year of Retirement

Inhalt This project analyzes recall error in the year of retirement by comparing the self-report of respondents of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) with administrative records of the same person provided by the German Pension Fund. A comparison of the two data sources show that 36.5 % of the respondents misreported the year they retired. Based on research from cognitive psychology, different determinants to explain the error are identified. A hurdle regression model is estimated consisting of two steps: first a logistic regression analyzing whether or not respondents make an error and second a zero-truncated negative binomial model to predict the size of the error. The results show that cognitive abilities as well as characteristics of the event are correlated with the error in both steps. In addition, some effects differ for male and female respondents.