The implementation of cross-sectional weights in household panel surveys

Abstract

While household panel surveys are longitudinal in nature cross-sectional sampling weights are also of interest. The computation of cross-sectional weights is challenging because household compositions change over time. Sampling probabilities of household entrants after wave 1 are generally not known and assigning them zero weight is not satisfying. Two common approaches to cross-sectional weighting address this issue: (1) “shared weights” and (2) modeling or estimating unobserved sampling probabilities based on person-level characteristics. We survey how several well-known national household panels address cross-sectional weights for different groups of respondents (including immigrants and ..