Using Employee Level Data in a Firm Level Econometric Study

In this paper, we make the general point that econometric studies of the firm can be effectively and substantially enriched by using information collected from employees, even if only a few of them are surveyed per firm. Though variables measured on the basis of the answers of very few employees per firm are subject to very important sampling errors, they can be usefully included in a model specified at the firm level. In the first part of the paper, we show that in estimating parameters of interest in a regression model of the firm, the biases arising from the sampling errors in the employee based variables can be assessed, as long as we have a large enough sub-sample of firms with at least two or with more (randomly chosen) surveyed employees.
[ - ]
[ + ]