# **Administrative data**

# <u>Method</u>

Administrative records are data collected for carrying out governmental programs or processes. These include:

- Records related to regulation of the flow of goods and people across borders.

- Data from legal requirements to register events (births, marriages, among others).

- Benefits and obligations administration records (taxation, pensions, health insurance).

- Records related to administration public institutions (schools, health institutions, prisons).

- Data arising from government industry regulation (banking, transportation, telecommunications).

- • Records from electricity, water services or telephony utilities (Brackstone, 1987).

More broadly, administrative data can also include private companies’ records or any entities’ historical data on their assets, people, or resources. Schools, hospitals, and other organizations routinely collect data to serve students, clients, or stakeholders. In other words, administrative data cover a wide variety of areas, and are relatively inexpensive to collect since they are already available or captured as part of governmental or private companies’ processes.

Using administrative data also minimizes burdening participants with more surveys and avoids some data quality loss due to misreporting. Evidence shows that an important source of misreporting is the unwillingness to provide socially undesirable answers. Stigma is often associated with participation in welfare programs, for instance (Celhay, Meyer & Mittag, 2018). Criminal records or violence data are other examples of data that can be difficult to obtain with a survey or other method.

The versatility and availability of administrative data allows researchers to address a variety of important questions and areas, including long-term effects of past policies. Administrative data can provide accurate details related to policy costs and benefits (Penner & Dodge, 2019). For example, evaluators stop collecting data at the end of their study in most impact evaluations. However, participants of policy interventions or projects (the treatment group) remain captured in administrative records, which can provide valuable information to estimate long-term effects.

Evidence proving the value of administrative data is vast. Chetty et al. (2011) found evidence on income effects of having an experienced kindergarten teacher and higher-achieving classmates; and Aizer and Eli et al. (2016) found that cash transfers to poor families can have positive educational, mortality, and income outcomes on the families’ children decades after the transfers. As stated before, administrative data do not need to be supplied by government; there is a long tradition of case studies using administrative records from company human resources departments, for instance. Fernandez and Greenber (2013) found evidence of gender and race inequality in the hiring processes of companies; and Fernandez and Rubineau (2019) analyzed the impact of network recruitment effects on the gender “glass ceiling” in the biopharma industry.

When administrative records are good quality, they can even be linked to households or other individuallevel surveys to add variables to the survey, but also to measure and improve survey accuracy. Davern et al. (2008) used an imputation method to test the validity of self-reported health insurance coverage in survey data; Meyer and Mittag (2019) used administrative data to identify patterns and uncover 22