Past event
St Andrews Policy Seminar with Dr Larissa Marioni, NIESR Using New Sources of Data to Understand Digital Skills Demand and Supply
Marioni is a Principal Economist at NIESR specializing in applied microeconomics, with research on labour economics, productivity, and regional inequality. Her work on skills mismatches and infrastructure connectivity has directly informed UK government and devolved policy discussions.
Abstract: This paper aims to explore and assess alternative data sources for wealth in order to improve existing pension wealth statistics. We find that, notwithstanding some limitations, the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS) is currently the most comprehensive source. Then, we conduct a comparative analysis of WAS against alternative data sources, including potential new sources. Our findings suggest that, despite WAS being somewhat good at capturing variations in pension wealth across the population, it appears deficient in capturing well pension uptake for the lower three deciles. Together, pension wealth at the top end is also underreported. We recommend using alternative sources of information, such as a one-time survey and/or using a microsimulation approach to complement the available data.
The St Andrews Policy Seminars are supported by the Lavelle 4 Foundation.