Defining Areas : Linking Geographic Data in New Zealand

This paper develops a match quality statistic to aid researchers in linking regional data that are available at inconsistent levels of aggregation. The match quality statistic developed in the paper allows researchers to make their own decisions regarding the tradeoff between specifi city and completeness when choosing a basis for linking such data. We illustrate this statistic with the example of a New Zealand labour economics research project that required different spatial data to be combined. A program to calculate the match quality statistic, coded as a Stata® ado file, is available on request from the authors