CHASM 2018 International Fellow Seminars

Two of our international visitors will present their research.

What did you really earn last year? Explaining measurement error in survey income data

Speaker: Stefan Angel, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Institute for Social Policy

(Based on the work of Stefan Angel, Franziska Disslbacher, Stefan Humer, Matthias Schnetzer). Income data plays an essential role for a variety of welfare indicators and policy questions. Such data is obtained either from household surveys or from administrative records and is important for policy formulation. Yet while policy recommendations are frequently based on survey data, issues of measurement error are often raised, raising the question of how valid some results are. This seminar uses data from Austrian 2008--2011 waves of EU-SILC to explore these issues, and in particular four sources of measurement error: namely (1) social desirability, (2) socio-demographic characteristics of the respondent, (3) the survey design, and (4) the presence of learning effects. The seminar will present strong evidence for a social desirability bias in income reporting (significant mean-reverting errors), and evidence suggesting that the presence of learning effects depends on the income type.

Retirement reform in South Africa: Our journey to pension tax simplification

Speaker: Professor Bernadene de Clercq – University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

This seminar will combine two topics - the first part of the presentation focusing on the recent and current retirement reforms in South Africa in the broader sense providing background to the pension system and what the Government is aiming to do to address the aging population issue and other challenges in the country in relation to later life financing. The second part will address what has done within the tax system to try and simplify tax in relation to retirement and pensions, indicating some of the challenges experienced in this process and how these were overcome.

Lunch will be at 12 noon.

Please contact Helen Harris if you would like to attend h.m.a.harris@bham.ac.uk