The Accuracy of Economic Measurement in the Health and Retirement Study

We assess the quality of the HRS's measures of out-of-pocket medical spend-
ing and health insurance premia, both in the \core interviews" and in the \exit
interview" data. We provide detailed evidence on the quality of the HRS insur-
ance premia data, and we compare the HRS exit data to exit data in the MCBS.
We document how changes in survey questions, including the introduction of
\unfolding brackets", aect the HRS measures. We document what we believe
are errors in the HRS imputations and provide some suggestions for improving
the accuracy of some imputed variables. Overall, we nd the HRS data to be of
high quality. However, we believe that many interesting variables in the HRS
are under-utilized because users must perform imputations themselves.