Historical data linkage of tax records on earnings: The case of the Living in Canada Survey pilot

• Activity Number: 393
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2011 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Government Statistics
• Author(s): Manon Langevin*+ and Andrew Heisz
• Companies: Statistics Canada and Statistics Canada
• Keywords: historical linkage ; retrospective linkage ; tax data ; administrative data ; matched data ; linkage rate

Abstract

Data matching is a common practice used to reduce the response burden of respondents and to improve the quality of the information collected from respondents when the linkage method does not introduce bias. However, historical linkage, which consists in linking external records from previous years to the year of the initial wave of a survey, is relatively rare and, until now, had not been used at Statistics Canada. The present paper describes the method used to link the records from the Living in Canada Survey pilot to historical tax data on income and labour (T1 and T4 files). It presents the evolution of the linkage rate going back over time and compares earnings data collected from personal income tax returns with those collected from employer files. To illustrate the new possibilities of analysis offered by this type of linkage, the study concludes with an earnings profile by age and sex for different cohorts based on year of birth.