Weighting for employer non-response in ASHE

Stokes, Lucy; Forth, John; Ritchie, Felix; Singleton, Carl; Phan, Van; Bryson, Alex; Whittard, Damian; McKenzie, Arusha

Abstract

The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) is based on a 1% sample of employee jobs and provides many of the UK’s official earnings statistics. Weights are provided with the core dataset, which adjust the profile of the annual achieved sample such that it is representative of employees by gender, age, occupation and
region. However, while the ASHE is based on a sample of employee jobs, the survey is completed by employers. Not all employers respond, and some do not respond quickly enough for their returns to be incorporated in the annual dataset. In this methodological note, we explore the characteristics of employers responding to ASHE. We show that certain types of organisations are over or under-represented in the achieved sample, even after applying the weights from the core dataset. We construct an adjustment to those existing weights that attempts to remove these biases. We discuss the implications for some headline estimates of earnings.

• Working Paper Type: Working Paper
• Deposit Date: Oct 24, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 24, 2022
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10105399