Accurately measuring household income and poverty is essential to understanding the nation’s overall economic wellbeing. Many studies show that measurement error stemming from unit nonresponse, item nonresponse and misreporting biases key official statistics such as mean or median income and the official poverty rate. The direction of bias differs between these sources of measurement error. Unit and item nonresponse have been found to bias income up and poverty down (Rothbaum et al., 2021; Rothbaum and Bee, 2022; Bollinger et al., 2018; Hokayem, Raghunathan and Rothbaum, 2022), while misreporting can bias income down and poverty up (Bee and Mitchell, 2017; Meyer et al., 2021b; Larrimore, Mortenson and Splinter, 2020). Since these error components are typically studied in isolation, their overall impact on the accuracy of survey estimates remains unclear.

This paper summarizes the National Experimental Wellbeing Statistics (NEWS) Project, which integrates this research and address each of these sources of bias simultaneously in order to produce more accurate estimates of household income and poverty. The NEWS project makes three unique contributions. First, we address as many sources of measurement error as we can simultaneously – including unit and item nonresponse and underreporting in surveys as well as the various challenges in administrative data such as measurement error, conceptual misalignment, and incomplete coverage. Second, we bring together all of the available survey and administrative data, which allows to address many of the shortcomings of individual data sources. Third, we propose a model to combine survey and administrative earnings data given measurement error in both sources, replacing ad hoc assumptions that have been used in prior work.