The Feasibility and Importance of Adding Measures of Actual Experience to Cross-Sectional Data Collection

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the American Economic Association meetings, San Francisco, January 2009, the Cornell-Princeton Conference on the Princeton Data Improvement Initiative (PDII), Princeton, NJ, October 2008, and the PDII preconference, Amelia, FL, February 2007. The authors thank Orley Ashenfelter, Kevin Hallock, Lawrence Katz, Thomas Lemieux, participants at these conferences, and two anonymous referees for valuable comments and suggestions, Tecla Loup of the University of Michigan Survey Research Center for helpful information about the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and Alan Krueger for help in preparing the PDII-Westat labor market survey data for analysis. We are grateful to the Princeton Data Improvement Initiative for funding this research. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.