The European Community household panel: a review

The European Community Household Panel (ECHP) is a standardized multi-purpose annual longitudinal survey carried out at the level of the European Union. It is centrally designed and coordinated by the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat), and covers demographics, labor force behavior, income, health, education and training, housing, migration, etc. After reviewing the organization of the survey, this paper discusses some of the issues that an applied economist potentially interested in the ECHP may face when trying to deal with these data. In particular, the paper focuses on survey attrition and nonresponse, the weighting procedures with which Eurostat tries to compensate for differential nonresponse and attrition rates, and the imputation methods adopted by Eurostat in order to deal with item nonresponse.