Measuring government benefit receipt in household surveys is important to assess the economic circumstances of disadvantaged populations, program takeup, the distributional effects of government programs, and other program effects. Receipt of food stamps is especially important given the large and growing size of the program and evidence of its effects on labor supply, health and other outcomes. We use administrative data on food
stamp participation in two states matched to American Community Survey (ACS), Current Population Survey (CPS), and Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) household data. We find that 23 percent of true recipient households do not report receipt in the SIPP, 35 percent in the ACS, and fully 50 percent do not report receipt in the CPS. Both false negative and false positive reports vary with individual characteristics, leading to complicated biases in food stamp analyses. Our results are also informative about the reasons for misreporting and the success of different survey methods. We then directly examine biases in research finding, in particular the determinants of program receipt using our combined administrative and survey data. Our results differ from conventional estimates in showing higher participation by single parents, non-whites, middle-income households, and other groups. We directly examine one source of potential error, Census Bureau imputations, finding that excluding the imputed observations leads to worse ACS estimates, but has little effect on the CPS and SIPP estimates.