Strategies to integrate longitudinal household data to EUROMOD: Technical notes for merging longitudinal EUSILC 2022 with EUROMOD 2022 data files

Our aim in Task 4.2 of Work package 4 of the SWINS (Sustainable Well-Being Through INvestment in Social Services) project, to which this deliverable belongs, was to  explore possibilities of linking longitudinal EU-SILC with EUROMOD input data files to extend opportunities to study economic and social returns of investments in social services. The benefit of the longitudinal EU-SILC is that its rotational panel design allows following individuals over a 4-year period in most countries, which enables us to model transitions. On the other hand, EUROMOD includes valuable information on benefits and taxes apart from the socio-economic variables. This report will serve as an input for Tasks 6.1 and 6.4 of SWINS. Furthermore, we hope to provide useful input for further research that aims to leverage the integration of the two data sources.

We identified two approaches for integrating longitudinal EU-SILC and EUROMOD input data sets.

1. Directly match individuals in the longitudinal EU-SILC and the EUROMOD input data, based on common identifiers
2. Align the longitudinal EU-SILC data with the EUROMOD input data structure by generating the variables present in the EUROMOD data files in the longitudinal EU-SILC datasets, based on the variable definitions provided by the country-specific EUROMOD Documented Reference Dataset (DRD) files.

From the two approaches we preferred the first one, as in the case of direct matching we do not lose variables and the process is more transparent and less time-consuming. Furthermore, we may not be able to reconstruct all EUROMOD variables based on longitudinal EU-SILC. Accordingly, we investigated the possibility of direct linkage based on personal identifiers. We found that linking the cross-sectional and longitudinal EU-SILC files is possible from 2022 onwards for most EU countries, and accordingly EUROMOD data files may also be linked to longitudinal EU-SILC from 2022. The rest of the document provides a technical description of merging longitudinal EU-SILC 2022 with EUROMOD 2022 data files. Section 2 includes descriptive statistics about the matched datasets. Section 3 briefly concludes. In in annex, we provide the Stata codes used for linking the datasets.