Giustinelli Pamela, Manski Charles F, Molinari Francesca
Department of Economics, Bocconi University.
Department of Economics, Northwestern University.
J Econom. 2022 Nov;231(1):265-281. doi: 10.1016/j.jeconom.2020.03.020. Epub 2020 Sep 15.
We study rounding of numerical expectations in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) between 2002 and 2014. We document that respondent-specific rounding patterns across questions in individual waves are quite stable across waves. We discover a tendency by about half of the respondents to provide more refined responses in the tails of the 0-100 scale than the center. In contrast, only about five percent of the respondents give more refined responses in the center than the tails. We find that respondents tend to report the values 25 and 75 more frequently than other values ending in 5. We also find that rounding practices vary somewhat across question domains and respondent characteristics. We propose an inferential approach that assumes stability of response tendencies across questions and waves to infer person-specific rounding in each question domain and scale segment and that replaces each point-response with an interval representing the range of possible values of the true latent belief. Using expectations from the 2016 wave of the HRS, we validate our approach. To demonstrate the consequences of rounding on inference, we compare best-predictor estimates from face-value expectations with those implied by our intervals.
我们研究了2002年至2014年期间健康与退休研究（HRS）中数值期望的舍入情况。我们记录到，个体各轮调查中针对不同问题的特定受访者舍入模式在各轮调查中相当稳定。我们发现，约一半的受访者倾向于在0至100量表的两端提供比中间更精确的回答。相比之下，只有约5%的受访者在中间比两端提供更精确的回答。我们发现，受访者报告以25和75结尾的值的频率高于其他以5结尾的值。我们还发现，舍入做法在不同问题领域和受访者特征之间略有差异。我们提出了一种推断方法，该方法假设跨问题和轮次的回答倾向具有稳定性，以推断每个问题领域和量表区间内特定于个人 的舍入情况，并用代表真实潜在信念可能值范围的区间替换每个点回答。利用HRS 2016年调查轮次的期望，我们验证了我们的方法。为了证明舍入对推断的影响，我们将基于票面价值期望的最佳预测估计与我们的区间所隐含的估计进行了比较。
