No. 2019-17 - A note on the replication of the European Socio-economic Classification (ESeC) in the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC)

Abstract:

The European Socio-Economic Classification (ESeC) is quite popular in social science research, especially as an indicator of social class. The EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) provides the opportunity to study the relation between ESeC and a long list of socio-economic variables (including income, employment, material deprivation, ...) in a comparative and longitudinal perspective. However, to the best of my knowledge, very few people work with ESeC in EU-SILC. Therefore, in this research note, I document the data quality of EU-SILC in terms of measuring ESeC, and propose a slightly modified version of computing ESeC compared to the routines one can find on the GESIS webiste. More in particular, I look at the availability and comparability of the variables that are required to construct ESeC, document some issues with non-response bias and the comparability of the selected respondent countries, and provide list of general recommendations when using ESeC in EU-SILC, as well as a detailed list of issues by country. An excel file with background tables and a STATA do-file to construct ESeC for all EU-SILC countries in EU- SILC 2014-2017 accompany this paper.