Abstract
Measuring change over time in areas such as family structure, employment, income, and poverty is of great interest to social scientists. The panel component of the Current Population Survey (CPS) affords the opportunity to observe short-term change in these areas. The Annual Social and Economic supplement (ASEC), with its wealth of information on income, health insurance coverage, benefits receipt, and many other topics, is a particularly popular resource for this purpose. However, commonly used methods for linking CPS ASEC files do not address how to link the ASEC oversample records across years, leading to smaller linked sample sizes. We demonstrate how to recover the linkable oversample cases in the 2005–2020 ASEC, resulting in about 150,000 more linked records (between 13,000 and 19,000 yearly) which represents a 30% increase in the overall linked sample size.
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Data Availability
All data utilized in this analysis (Flood et al., 2020) are publicly accessible through IPUMS.org: https://cps.ipums.org/cps/.
Notes
Although the oversample respondents have non-March BMS responses, the Census Bureau does not provide identifiers to link the oversample responses to their BMS responses.
Feng 2001 also creates ASEC panels using a Bayesian approach for validating links. However, the methodology cannot be extended after 2002 and so is not covered here.
ASECs being administered in February or April likely have no consequential data collection issues since the ASEC primarily asks questions about the prior calendar year. The most important difference between March and February/April ASEC respondents is the sampling methodology and demographics of the respondents.
See IPUMS CPS description (https://cps.ipums.org/cps-action/variables/mish) of MISH for more details. This particularity has no effect on cross-sectional estimates and is only necessary to be corrected for linking purposes.
This process is documented in Flood & Pacas (2017) and available via IPUMS variable ASECOVERP (https://cps.ipums.org/cps-action/variables/ASECOVERP).
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Joe Ritter and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field. Funding was provided by the Minnesota Population Center through a grant (P2C HD041023) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development NICHD.
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Pacas, J.D., Rodgers, R. Research Note on Linking CPS ASEC Files. Popul Res Policy Rev 42, 50 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-023-09798-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-023-09798-8