Identifying couples in administrative data

"We develop a new method for identifying married couples in administrative data. Using address and name data from the universe of employment records in Germany we find around 3.3 million pairs of individuals who are living at the same location, have a matching last name and are less than 15 years apart in age. We show supporting evidence that around 89 to 94 percent of these pairs are indeed married couples and provide careful consistency checks. Using information from the German Microcensus, we show that our method identifies about 18 percent of all married couples in Germany and about 25 percent of couples where the husband is younger than 65. Our method thus opens the door for household level analyses benefiting from the precision and very large number of observations available in administrative data." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))