Estimating Measurement Error in SIPP Annual Job Earnings: A

Comparison of Census Survey and SSA Administrative Data

John M. Abowd and Martha H. Stinsony

September 2007

Abstract

We quantify sources of variation in annual job earnings data collected by the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to determine how much of the variation is the result of measurement error. Jobs reported in the SIPP are

linked to jobs reported in a new administrative database, the Detailed Earnings Records (DER) drawn from the Social

Security Administrations Master Earnings File, a universe le of all earnings reported on W-2 tax forms. As a result of the

match, each job potentially has two earnings observations per year: survey and administrative. Unlike previous validation

studies, both of these earnings measures are viewed as noisy measures of some underlying true amount of annual earnings.

While the existence of survey error resulting from respondent mistakes or misinterpretation is widely accepted, the idea

that administrative data is also error-prone is new. Possible sources of employer reporting error, employee under-reporting

of compensation such as tips, and general di¤erences between how earnings may be reported on tax forms and in surveys,

necessitates the discarding of the assumption that administrative data is a true measure of the quantity that the survey

was designed to collect. In addition, errors in matching SIPP and DER jobs, a necessary task in any use of administrative

data, also contribute to measurement error in both earnings variables. We begin by comparing SIPP and DER earnings

for di¤erent demographic and education groups of SIPP respondents. We also calculate di¤erent measures of changes in

earnings for welfare respondents moving on and o¤ public assistance and changes in earnings for individuals switching jobs.

We estimate a standard earnings equation model using SIPP and DER earnings and compare the resulting coe¢cients.

Finally exploiting the presence of individuals with multiple jobs and shared employers over time, we estimate an econometric model that includes random person and rm e¤ects, a common error component shared by SIPP and DER earnings,

and two independent error components that represent the variation unique to each earnings measure. We compare the

variance components from this model and consider how the DER and SIPP di¤er across unobservable components.

1 Introduction

This paper makes use of a linked survey-administrative database to compare two di¤erent measures of earnings and consider

the causes of the di¤erences between them. We link job-level earnings reports from the Survey of Income and Program

Participation (SIPP) to W-2 records extracted from the Social Security Administrations Master Earnings File. This extract

is called the Detailed Earnings Records (DER) le. We use SSN and name of the employer to match SIPP reported jobs to

the DER. These matched records provide a unique opportunity to assess di¤erences in employee and employer reports and

to consider the impact of these di¤erences on correlations of earnings and other variables of interest in the SIPP survey.

The majority of past studies which compare two data sources, choose one of the sources to be the truth1

. In contrast, we

begin wtih an agnostic view about which data source is true, believing instead that there are legitimate di¤erences between

survey and administrative reports. Our goal is to rst state the di¤erences between the two data sources and then consider

the reasons for these di¤erences. We believe there are at least three reasons why administrative and SIPP survey reports on

earnings might di¤er. First, there may be mis-matches between the records from the two sources. Our matching methodology

uses a probablistic record link which produces some false matches. Also while identiers for individuals remain constant

over time in administrative databases, identiers for rms do not and this complicates the matching process. Second, the

We would like to thank Joanne Pascale, Tracy Mattingly, Gary Benedetto, Julia Lane, George Jakubson, Donald Kenkel, Simon Woodcock,

Kevin McKinney, Kristin Sandusky, Lars Vilhuber, and Marc Roemer for helpful comments and support. This report is released to inform interested

parties of ongoing research and to encourage discussion of work in progress. Any views expressed on statistical, methodological, technical, or

operational issues are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the U.S. Census Bureau, Cornell University, or any of the pro ject sponsors.

This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation Grant SES-9978093 to Cornell University (Cornell Institute for Social and

Economic Research), the National Institute on Aging, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. All of the data used in this paper are condential

data. The U.S. Census Bureau supports external researchers use of some of these data items; please visit www.sipp.census.gov/sipp/ and click on

"Access SIPP Synthetic Data."

yJohn M. Abowd is Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, Distinguished Senior Research Fellow at the U.S. Census

Bureau, Research Associate NBER, Research A¢liate CREST/INSEE, and Research Fellow IZA. Martha Stinson is an economist at the U.S.

Census Bureau. contacts: john_abowd@cornell.edu, martha.stinson@census.gov

1For example, Duncan and Hill (1985) and Bound et al. (1994) compare employee and employer earnings reports from a large manufacturing

company and treat the employer reports as truth. Bound and Krueger (1991) compare CPS earnings reports to SSA records and treat the SSA

data as truth.

1
administrative records we utilize do not contain some types of earnings such as health insurance premiums that are usually

reported on a pay stub and would probably be reported by a survey respondent. The reverse is also true: there are types of

earnings which would appear on a W-2 form and would not appear on a pay stub, increasing the likelihood that these earnings

would not be reported in a survey. Finally there are di¤erences in reporting that can be labeled mistakes or measurement

error. We believe these types of di¤erences arise in both data sources. Employers make mistakes on W-2 forms just as

employees make mistakes when they report earnings to a survey collector. The Social Security Administration does make

corrections to the Master Earnings File when revised W-2 forms are submitted so over time these mistakes become less

prevelant. One might hypothesize that errors in an administrative database are in general less prevelant than in a survey

but they still undoubtedly exist.

Our strategy for investigating the di¤erences between the SIPP and DER is to rst focus on average di¤erences for

demographic sub-groups of interest. If di¤erences between the two data sources vary across sub-groups, this may be

evidence of mistakes made more frequently by some types of survey respondents. On the other hand it could also be that

some sub-groups have more complicated types of earnings which will give rise to more denitional types of discprepancies

between the two data sources. After these initial comparisons, we next focus on di¤erences between the sources that are due

to unobservable factors. Within each cell dened by a set of stratifying variables, there are average SIPP and DER earnings

and then there is variation due to unobservable person, rm, and time period characteristics. We consider how much of this

variation is common between the SIPP and the DER and how much might be unique to one data source or the other.

Our paper is organized as follows. We begin by describing the two data sources and our process for matching them. We

discuss problems with this process and describe our nal set of person-employer matches. We then explain the details of

our analytic comparisons and our model for estimating the variance due to unobservable factors. We follow with results and

discussion of potential causes of the di¤erences that we observe. We end by trying to interpret our results in a measurement

error framework, where we dene measurement error as failure on the part of the survey to collect the intended quantity. We

provide a range of estimates for the reliability of the SIPP data, making di¤erent assumptions about the sources of di¤erences

between SIPP and DER data.

2 Data Description

The fundamental unit of observation in this paper is a job, dened as a match between an individual and a rm. Data

on jobs come from two sources: ve Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) Panels conducted during the

1990s and the Detailed Earnings Records (DER) extracted from the Social Security Administration Master Earnings File

for the respondents in each of the ve panels. In both sources, data on earnings were reported on a sequential, calendar-year

basis and job records had to be created by combining earnings records over time that belonged to the same job. Hence

appropriately grouping earnings records and dening jobs was the rst fundamental di¢culty that we addressed in each data

source. After job records were created, individuals in each data set were linked by Social Security Number. Finally, jobs

for each individual from the two data sources were matched to each other. Each step of this process is described below.

2.1 Creating a SIPP Jobs Data Set

All the SIPP Panels conducted in the 1990s interviewed respondents every 4 months over the course of 2 1/2 to 4 years.

Interviewees were divided into 4 rotation groups and one group was interviewed each month. At the time of the interview,

retrospective information about the previous 4 months was collected2

. Respondents were asked to report detailed information

for up to 2 jobs they held during this time period. The employer name, industry, occupation, union status, usual weekly

hours, and monthly earnings of each job were recorded, as well as any applicable start and end dates. Each job was also

assigned a unique identication number, or job ID, with the intent that this identier be time-invariant and allow the linking

2 The SIPP panels generally began by interviewing the second rotation group in February of the panel reference year and collecting information

about the previous 4 months. Interviews with the third, fourth, and rst rotation groups followed and the reference period for collecting information

moved forward each time so as to correspond to the preceding four months. For example, in the 1990 panel, the rst interview cycle went as

follows:

Second rotation group: interviewed in Feb.1990 and answered questions about Oct.1989-Jan.1990.

Third rotation group: interviewed in Mar. 1990 and answered questions about Nov.1989-Feb.1990

Fourth rotation group: interviewed in Apr.1990 and answered questions about Dec.1989-Mar.1990

First rotation group: interviewed in May 1990 and answered questions about Jan.1990-Apr.1990

This cycle continued until Sept. 1992 when the 8th interview with the rst rotation group was completed, giving 8 complete waves of data for

each rotation group. Thus the 1990 panel contains information on Oct.1989-Aug.1992. The following list gives the number of waves for each

SIPP panel and the span of months referenced by the interview questions.

1990 panel: 8 waves, Oct.1989-Aug.1992

1991 panel: 8 waves, Oct.1990-Aug.1993

1992 panel: 10 waves, Oct.1991-Apr.1995

1993 panel: 9 waves, Oct.1992-Dec.1995

1996 panel: 12 waves, Dec.1995-Feb.2000

The cycle of interviews is slightly di¤erent for the 1996 panel. The rst rotation group was interviewed in April 1996 followed by the second,

third, and fourth rotation groups in May, June, and July. Thus the span of referenced months begins in December instead of October and ends

in February instead of April, August, or December.

2
of job information across survey waves. For the rst four panels (1990-1993), a paper and pencil survey instrument was

used. During each interview, the Census eld representative (FR) was required to record an employer name and assign a

job ID for each job reported by the respondent, even if the job was a continuation of a job reported in a previous wave.

While the FR was supposed to assign the same job ID to a continuing job and a new job ID to a newly begun job, there was

no quality check to ensure that this procedure was followed. Beginning in 1996, a major survey redesign was implemented

and information was collected using a Computer Assisted Personal Interview (CAPI) system. As a result, as long as the

individual did not miss an interview, during the second and subsequent interviews, the CAPI instrument automatically

assigned the same employer name and job ID each time further information about a continuing job was collected. When the

respondent reported that a new job had started, the CAPI instrument assigned the next available job ID.

Job records were indexed by the longitudinal SIPP person ID, the wave (interview) number, and the job ID. We combined

these records to create one observation per job that contained some time invariant job information, such as industry, and

some time-varying information such as annual earnings. Table 1 shows the total number of respondents in each SIPP panel,

the number that report holding at least one job over the course of the SIPP panel, the total number of person-wave-job

records, and the total number of jobs reported, using the assigned SIPP job ID to count jobs. A careful examination of the

person-wave-job records revealed serious problems with the SIPP job ID coding process. Because the denition of a job

was so crucial to our comparison of job earnings from the SIPP and the DER data, we investigated the nature and causes

of the job ID coding problems and developed an editing procedure that would resolve some of the inconsistencies we found.

This section describes some of the problems we found and gives a summary of how we repaired the job id variables. Details

about our edits are contained in Appendix A.

In the 1996 SIPP panel, the largest problem with jobs arose when the jobs had start dates prior to the beginning of the

rst wave in which they were reported and prior to the beginning of the previously held job. Table 2 gives one generic

example of the cause of this problem. In this case, the individual was interviewed in waves 1 through 4 and reported a job

which began February 1, 1996. However, the individual missed the fth interview. When the next interview was conducted

in wave 6, a new job was reported but the start date was prior to the beginning of wave 6 and prior to the beginning of job

1. The CAPI system was not designed to allow job IDs to be carried forward through missed interviews. Consequently,

when this person temporarily dropped out of the panel, she was automatically given a new job ID at the time of the next

interview, regardless of whether the job had actually begun in wave 6 or not. However, there were no restrictions placed on

the start date she reported and hence this discrepancy arose. The case illustrated in Table 2 was the most common cause

of the early start date problem. However it was not the only cause. The problem a¤ected 21.6% of all jobs (29,520) and

about 40% of the time there appears to have been a missing wave problem, while the rest of the time, the cause could not

be determined. Whatever the reason, it was clear that the survey job IDs sometimes failed to link job records.

The problems encountered in the early SIPP panels (1990-1993) were considerably more complicated. There were two

major types of problems - improper re-use of job IDs and improper assigning of new job IDs. Tables 3A and 3B give generic

examples of these problems. In Table 3A, the SIPP respondent held the same job throughout the rst four waves of the

survey. However, in wave 3, the job ID was incorrectly changed, causing it to appear as if there had been a job transition.

This error is identiable because the name of the employer stays the same across the waves. Table 3B shows the second type

of problem. In this case, the person changed jobs between waves 3 and 4 but the job ID was not changed. Thus, it appears

that the person remained at the same job through all four waves and, consequently, a job transition was missed. Again, the

true work history is apparent only through scrutinizing the employer names.

We developed an editing procedure that used employer name and person-level total job counts from the DER data to

identify and correct SIPP job ID coding errors. This procedure involved several phases. First, employer names from job

records were compared using statistical name matching software and those names deemed to be the same were grouped

together by assigning new job IDs. Second, using these new job IDs, the total number of jobs held over the course of the

survey was counted for each individual. A similar count was performed in the administrative DER data. A comparison was

made between these two counts to identify cases where the name matching software had failed to correct or had introduced new

job history errors. In the 1990-1993 panels, the group of problem observations was large enough to warrant further editing

e¤orts. A second pass with the name matching software was performed and then a series of clerical edits was undertaken.

In the 1996 panel, the job count comparison showed that the name matching step had corrected the most obvious problems

and further editing was deemed unlikely to provide enough improvements to be worth the resource cost involved. More

detail on the name matching procedure and the clerical edits can be found in Appendix A. A detailed description of the full

process for the 1990-1993 panels can be found in Stinson (2003)3

. Tables 4A and 4B provide a summary of the process for

all the SIPP panels, showing how many unique jobs resulted from each step of the editing procedure and how many records

were a¤ected at each step. Row 5 of Table 4A and row 2 of Table 4B show the nal number of jobs dened by the revised

set of job IDs and row 6 and row 3, respectively, show the number of jobs belonging to people who still have discrepancies

between job counts in the DER and the SIPP. We are condent that the majority of these cases are the result of reporting

di¤erences between the survey and the administrative data and not failure to link job records in the SIPP.

Once we had dened a set of jobs for each SIPP panel, we created annual earnings measures by summing monthly earnings

reports. It is important to understand the concept of earnings as used during the SIPP interview. During the 1990-1993

3Recognizing that a similar edit could not be performed by researchers lacking access to the DER data, the Census Bureau has publicly released

the revised SIPP job ids for the 1990-1993 SIPP panels on the SIPP website, http://www.sipp.census.gov/sipp/access.html.

3
SIPP panels, respondents were asked about earnings from a specic employer in the following way: The next question is

about the pay ... received from this job during the 4-month period. We need the most accurate gures you can provide.

Please remember that certain months contain 5 paydays for workers paid weekly and 3 paydays for workers paid every 2

weeks. Be sure to include any tips, bonuses, overtime pay, or commissions. What was the total amount of pay that ...

received BEFORE deductions on this job in ...? The eld representative reads the name of each month and separately

records earnings for that month. A special caveat is added for members of the Armed Forces, Be sure to include cash

housing allowances and any other special types of pay. The intent of the survey question was to collect gross earnings and

if the person responded that he or she did not know the earnings amounts, the eld representative asked if the person could

provide the information during a follow-up phone call.

The 1996 survey instrument asked, Each time he/she was paid by [Name of Employer] in [MonthX], how much did he/she

receive BEFORE deductions? The eld representative then followed up with questions about whether there were any other

payments such as tips, bonuses, overtime pay, or commissions. The FR was trained to probe several times to make sure all

the payments from an employer in a given month were accurately reported. There were also consistency checks built into

the CAPI instrument that were meant to spot earnings amounts that seemed unreasonable and provide the FR with the

opportunity to make corrections. Respondents were also asked to refer to earnings records if possible so as to give accurate

responses. Thus in the best case, these earnings reports most likely reected the gross pay from monthly pay stubs.

2.2 Creating a DER Jobs Data Set

The second source of data, Detailed Earnings Records (DER) from SSA, contained earnings histories for each SIPP respondent

in the 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1996 panels with a validated SSN (for a denition and discussion of validation see section

3.3: Matching SIPP and DER Jobs). These histories included reports of annual earnings, by employer, from 1978-2000.

For the purposes of this earnings comparison study, however, only non-self-employment jobs held during the time period

covered by the survey questions were used4

. Employers on this administrative data were identied by an IRS-assigned

Employer Identication Number (EIN). Table 5 gives the total number of jobs that appear in the DER for SIPP respondents

in all ve panels and the total number of unique EINs, followed by the time period covered by the survey and the total

number of jobs and unique EINs for this time period.

The earnings data contained in these DER les have as their source the W-2 records led by employers on behalf of

each employee. The primary earnings variable comes from Box 1 of the W-2 Form: wages, tips, and other compensation.

This earnings variable is uncapped and represents all earnings that were taxable under federal income tax. There are at

least two parts of earnings that would be reported on an employees pay stub in gross earnings that are not included in

Box 1: pre-tax health insurance plan premiums paid by the employee and pre-tax elective contributions made to deferred

compensation arrangements such as 401(k) retirement plans. In the later case, these contributions are reported elsewhere

on the W-2 form (for example Box 13 in 1999) and the DER le contains reports of these deferred earnings which can be

added to Box 1 earnings to approximate gross earnings. While pre-tax health insurance plan premiums are reported on the

W-2 Form, they are not contained in the DER extract created for research use. This omission represents one important way

in which administrative records may di¤er from survey records that is not the result of error in the survey data collection

process. DER earnings will be lower than SIPP earnings if the respondent reported gross earnings during the survey that

included health insurance plan premiums.

There are other possible di¤erences between Box 1 on the W-2 Form and gross earnings reported in the survey, most

of which involve some kind of employee benet that the employee is unlikely to consider wages and may also be unlikely

to be reported as such on a pay stub, but which the employer is nonetheless required to report as taxable income. These

include educational assistance above a certain monetary level, business expense reimbursement above the amount treated as

substantiated by the IRS, payments made by the employer to cover the employees share of Social Security and Medicare

taxes, certain types of fringe benets such as the use of a company car, golden parachute payments, group-term life insurance

over $50,000 paid for by the employer, potentially some portion of employer contributions to Medical Savings Accounts,

non-qualied moving expenses, and, in some circumstances, sick pay from an insurance company or other third party payer.

In all these cases, DER earnings are likely to be higher than SIPP earnings.

A nal potential problem with DER employer reports is that EINs do not necessarily remain constant over time. Unlike

Social Security Numbers which serve as good longitudinal identiers for individuals, EINs can change for many reasons that

do not necessarily involve a person moving to a new employer. Company reorganizations that consist of mergers, acquisitions,

or spin-o¤s of some parts of the company may result in a worker having two W-2 forms for a tax year, each with a di¤erent

EIN, without having actually changed jobs. In cases such as these, the DER earnings will be lower than the SIPP earnings

because a portion of the earnings for the year are missing. As part of the linking process between DER and SIPP earnings,

we attempt to identify these kinds of successor-predecessor problems and merge the two DER jobs determined to be related

to a single SIPP job (see Appendix C for details). However, at this early stage of research involving the administrative data,

there is no way to know how well our method works.

4 The Detailed Earnings Records did contain reports of self-employment earnings. The SIPP also collected information about self-employment,

but responses to these questions were treated separately from responses to the questions about jobs with employers. Self-employment reports from

either source were not included in this study.

4
The following list summarizes the potential denitional di¤erences between SIPP and DER earnings.

Health insurance premiums not included in the DER : DER < SIPP

Employee benets included in the DER : DER > SIPP

EIN changes due to change in rm organization or ownership : DER < SIPP

The EIN linked employers to the Business Register, the master list of all businesses maintained by the Census Bureau

that serves as the sampling frame for rm-level surveys. Using this link, we merged information from the Business Register

about the industry and name of the employer to each relevant job report in the DER data. Details about this merge can be

found in Appendix B. The employer name is the key linking element between the SIPP and DER job data.

2.3 Matching SIPP and DER Jobs

After the creation of the SIPP and DER jobs data sets, the next step was to take people who had job reports in both les

and try to match each SIPP job record to a DER job record. Table 6 shows the total number of people and jobs that were

potential matches following the job record creation process. Except for the 1996 SIPP jobs, the total number of jobs that

were potential matches is the same as row 5 in Table 4A for the SIPP jobs and row 4 of Table 5 for DER jobs. In 1996, one

nal problem necessitated the dropping of a few additional jobs. Respondents were only allowed to report at most two jobs

per interview. In cases where people had a series of short or part-time jobs, interviewers recorded a single job which was

labeled as various employers or work arrangement. There were 3,908 job records of this type in the 1996 SIPP data,

representing possibly triple that many actual jobs. These jobs were essentially impossible to match to the DER because

they do not represent earnings from a single employer. Hence, they were dropped, giving a new total of 121,450 jobs.

We began the job matching process by rst linking at the person level. The unique identier for a person on the DER was

the SSN while the SIPP contained a longitudinal person identier specic to the survey. A crosswalk le matched SSNs and

SIPP person IDs. This crosswalk was developed using self-reported SSNs and a validation procedure. Each SIPP respondent

was asked to provide an SSN. After this information was collected, SSA searched for each SSN in an administrative data base

called the Numident, a universe le containing demographic information collected when every SSN was issued. Self-reported

name, sex, race, and date of birth from the SIPP were compared to their administrative counterparts on the Numident. If a

respondents name and demographics were deemed close enough to the name and demographics associated with the SSN in

the administrative data base, then the SSN was declared valid. For respondents who answered do not know to the SSN

question, an attempt was made to nd the missing SSN by locating the person in the Numident based on their reported name

and demographic characteristics. When a respondent refused to provide an SSN, no attempt was made to link this person

to any administrative data and the SSN was left missing. Validated SSNs were included in the crosswalk le and served as

the basis for extracting Detailed Earnings Records from the SSA Master Earnings File. Hence in order for an individual to

have any earnings reports in the DER, he or she, by necessity, must have a validated SSN.

The third column of Table 6 shows the number of people who matched between the SIPP and the DER. In all panels,

some people were lost from both the SIPP and DER job data sets as a result of this match. On the SIPP side, there were

two reasons why a person might not match. First, he or she might not have a validated SSN. The third column of Table 7A

shows the number of people a¤ected by this problem. The second possibility was that the person had a validated SSN and

reported working in the SIPP, but did not have any earnings reports in the DER. This would be caused by the jobs being

relatively informal (baby-sitting, yard work, household help) and hence not generating W-2 forms, or by over-reporting of

jobs. On the DER side, the only reason for a person not to match was because the person did not report any jobs in the

SIPP survey. As seen in the third column of Table 7B, it was far more likely for a person to have jobs in the DER and not

the SIPP than the reverse. It would appear that overall, the SIPP undercounts employed people.

As shown in Table 6, even for those people who had employment reports in both the SIPP and the DER, the number of

jobs reported was much higher in the administrative data compared to the survey data. At least one factor that inuenced

the job count on each side was the timing of the survey. In every SIPP panel, the survey asked employment questions of

at least some respondents in the last few months of the year preceding the o¢cial beginning year. For example in the 1990

panel, the rst interview reference period included between one and three months of 1989 for the second, third, and fourth

rotation groups. Also the last interviews in the 1990 panel were conducted in September 1992, leaving the last quarter

of 1992 uncovered for every rotation group. The 1991-1993 panels followed similar patterns. In the 1996 panel, the rst

interview reference period included December 1995 for the rst rotation group and the last reference period included one or

two months of 2000 for the third and fourth rotation groups. In order to attempt to match as many SIPP and DER jobs

as possible, all DER jobs from the year preceding the main survey beginning year and jobs from the last survey year were

included for the rotation groups that were surveyed at some point during these years. However, some of these DER jobs

could clearly have ended before the survey began or started after the survey ended, thus articially inating the DER job

counts. In the early SIPP panels (1990-1993), jobs that ended before the main survey year or began only in the survey

end-year accounted for 27%-32% of all DER jobs. In the 1996 panel, these jobs only accounted for 11% of all DER jobs,

largely because the timing of the survey conformed more closely to the calendar year. Another factor which articially

depressed the SIPP job counts is the fact that the survey only collected information covering a maximum of 2 jobs.

5
   

  

   

  

After we matched at the person-level by SSN, a job-to-job match was performed, again using the statistical name matching

software Integrity. The matching was performed in several steps, called passes. The goal was to rst link jobs that were

almost certain matches based on the elds deemed to be the most reliable matching indicators and then to link jobs that

were less certain matches using other elds. The primary basis for matching was self-reported name of the employer from

the SIPP and administrative name of the employer from the Census Business Register. Earnings were not used in the match

in order to prevent bias in the subsequent comparison of earnings. Appendix C gives the details of this match including

which matching variables were used in each pass and how duplicate matches were handled. Table 8 describes the results of

this job-level match. The rst row of Table 8 gives the number of SIPP jobs that were successfully matched to a counterpart

job in the DER. Of the jobs that matched, we then restricted ourselves to comparing earnings only in the full survey years.

If a matched job did not have SIPP and DER earnings report in at least one full survey year, we dropped the job. The

second row of Table 8 shows how many jobs were dropped because for this reason. This restriction ensured that we would

be comparing jobs that had provided income during roughly the same time period. However, the timing of the job in the

SIPP and the DER was not required to be identical. There were some jobs which matched but did not have the same

number of years of reported earnings. For example a SIPP job could have earnings reports for 1996 and 1997 but not 1998

while the DER job could have reports for all three years. In order for a job to be used in our comparisons, we required that

there be at least one DER earnings report and one SIPP earnings report for that job but we did not require these reports

to be in the same year. This resulted in slightly di¤erent sample sizes between the SIPP and the DER data for each year.

Missing values were modeled in the maximization routine as conditionally missing at random and hence the panel was not

required to be balanced. The decision not to require exact matching in the earnings years was based on the fact that earnings

essentially reported as zero in one source and positive in another source was a type of measurement error that we did not

wish to exclude. The third row shows the nal total number of jobs per panel that were used in the analysis. At this point

jobs from all panels were combined to give a total of 197,337 jobs, 133,849 people, and 110,454 unique employers.

Tables 9 and 10 describe the variance-covariance structure of the SIPP and DER earnings over time. The covariances

are listed below the diagonal and correlations are listed above. In the SIPP data, the correlations between adjacent years

range from .54-.74. In the DER, they are higher, ranging from .79 to .81. The variance of earnings is also higher in the

DER than in the SIPP. Table 11 gives the correlations between each year of DER and SIPP data. The correlations between

SIPP and DER earnings in the same year is quite high: .74-.86. The correlations between adjacent years of SIPP and DER

data are not as high as between adjacent years of DER data but the correlations are quite similar to adjacent years of SIPP

data. They range from .58-.71. In general, correlations in the early 1990s are lower than correlations in the later years of

the decade, as might be expected given the improvements of the 1996 panel.

3 Comparing Data Sources: observables and unobservables

Once the matching process was complete, we were able to compare SIPP and DER earnings at the job level. We began our

comparisons with simple tables of means, stratied by SIPP demographic and economic variables. These tables show average

di¤erences between SIPP and DER earnings and allow us to consider which groups have the most pronounced di¤erences.

We look at all individual-job matches and then look separately at individuals who were on welfare and individuals who

changed jobs. We also report regressions coe¢cients using both measures of earnings as dependent variables and compare

the results.

After exploring di¤erences in means, we estimate a model with both xed and random e¤ects (i.e. mixed e¤ects model) that

accounts for the observable di¤erences discussed above and quanties remaining di¤erences in unobservable characteristics.

Our modeling follows the spirit of Abowd and Card (1989). They examined the variance-covariance matrix of rst-di¤erenced

earnings and tested the t of various structural models, all of which included a measurement error component. Here our

model will rely on random person and rm e¤ects instead of rst-di¤erencing and has the advantage of a second source of

data to identify the e¤ects but the parsing of variance among structural components is similar.

We estimate the following SIPP earnings equation:

ln (SIP P EARNist) = 1SIP P Race:Gender + 2SIP P Race:Gender:Educ + 3SIP P Race:Gender:Expit + (1) oSIP P +

4SIP P T imeit + 5SIP P [P1990; P1991; P1992; P1993] + i + iSIP PDEV + j + jSIP PDEV + ist + !ist 

and the DER earnings equation for the same individual is identical except for the last component:

ln(DEREARNist) = + 1DERRace:Gender + 2DERRace:Gender:Educ + 3DERRace:Gender:Expit + (2) oDER 

4DERT imeit + 5DER [P1990; P1991; P1992; P1993] + i + iDERDEV + j + jDERDEV + ist + ist 

where i subscripts the individual, j subscripts the rm, s subscripts the person-rm match or job, and t subscripts the year.

The variables are dened as follows:

6
 

 

 

 





 

    



P1990; P1991; P1992; P1993 = vector of 4 indicator variables specifying the SIPP panel of the individual;

the 1996 panel is the excluded group

Race:Gender = full interaction of male and white produces four categories:

white male, non-white male, white female, non-white female

Educ = four levels of education fully interacted with race and gender:

high school degree, some college, college degree, graduate degree

separately for each demographic group

Expit = general labor market experience, fully interacted with race and gender:

actual exp. calculated using employment history collected in the SIPP;

experience enters as a piecewise linear spline with nodes at

2 years, 5 years, 10 years, and 25 years;

separate e¤ects for each demographic group

T imeit = calendar time, base year is 1990

Person heterogeneity = ()  N(0; G1)

 

Source-specic person heterogeneity = (SIP PDEV; DERDEV )  N(

0

0

; G1DEV )

Firm heterogeneity =  N(0; G2)

 

Source-specic rm heterogeneity = ( SIP PDEV; DERDEV )  N(

0

0

; G2DEV )

Common error component =   N(0; G3)

 

Measurement error, SIPP and DER = (!; )  N(

0

; R)

0

G1; G2; G3; R are dened below.

This model accounts for average di¤erences in the SIPP and DER using xed e¤ects for the intercept, race and gender

interactions, education, experience, and a time trend. The e¤ects,  and , are random person and rm e¤ects, respectively,

and capture unobservable e¤ects of individual and rm heterogeneity. We also interact the person and rm e¤ects with the

data source indicator in order to tell whether there is source specic variation at the person and rm levels. Thus SIP PDEV ; 

DERDEV ; ; SIP PDEV and DERDEV represent deviations from the main person and rm e¤ects. The e¤ect  is a shared

random error component that can be thought of as a nested individual-job-time period random e¤ect. This e¤ect is estimable

due to the presence of two earnings observations for each year of the panel. It represents economic noise, or uctuations

in annual earnings due to unobservable economic factors which inuence both earnings measures, presumably by inuencing

true underlying earnings. The nal terms in the model, ! and , are residuals that capture any remaining variation.

Strictly interpreted, these terms capture variation across time within a job that is unique to each data source.

The total number of jobs held by all individuals is N, the total number of individuals is I, the total number of rms

employing individuals in the sample is J, the number of covariates included in X is k, and the total number of time periods

is 10. The maximum number of time periods a job may be observed depends upon the origin SIPP panel. In the 1990,

1991, and 1993 SIPP panels, there are 2 years of complete earnings data. In the 1992 panel there are 3 years and in the

1996 panel, 4 years. Thus a job may be observed anywhere from 1 to 4 years depending on the tenure of the job and the

source panel.

Written in matrix notation, the model is

Y = X + Zu + e 

where Y is an (N 10 2) 1 vector of stacked SIPP and DER earnings, X is an (N 10 2) k matrix of covariates

treated as xed e¤ects, is a k 1 vector of xed e¤ects coe¢cients, Z is an (N 10 2) (I + J + N 10) design matrix

of the random e¤ects, u is a (I + J + N 10) 1 vector of random e¤ects and e is an (N 10 2) 1 vector of residuals.

The xed e¤ects represent shifts in the conditional mean of the distribution of SIPP or DER earnings. For example, the

0SIP P term is the mean of the entire SIPP earnings distribution and is the mean of the DER earnings distribution. 0DER 

The vector =[ 5SIP P 1990; 5SIP P 1991; 5SIP P 1992; 5SIP P 1993] captures shifts in the mean of the panel-specic earn- 5SIP P 

ings distributions due to di¤erences across SIPP panels. The equivalent vector reects shifts in the panel-specic 5DER 

DER earnings distributions due to the same cause.

The random e¤ects capture variation in the data due to individual, rm, or time period heterogeneity that is left after

controlling for observed characteristics. In other words, there is variation around the mean earnings due to unobservable

7
 

 








 


 

 







    

 





 

characteristics of the person, employer, or time period for every category of individuals dened by the variables treated as xed

(X). The random e¤ects quantify the amount of variance due to the di¤erent sources. The random e¤ects vector, u, contains

the stacked random e¤ects, 1:::I , 1SIP PDEV :::ISIP PDEV , 1DERDEV :::IDERDEV , 1

::: J, 1SIP PDEV ::: JSIP PDEV ,

The variance matrices for the random person, rm, and shared error component 1DERDEV ::: JDERDEV , 111990:::IN1999.

e¤ects, respectively, can be written as

G1 = III 

G1DEV = III 



2

 



2 0 SIP PDEV   0 

2

DERDEV 



2 G2 = IJJ

  

2 0

G SIP PDEV 

2DEV = IJxJ 0 

2

DERDEV

3

1  2

::: 9

 1  ::: ::: 

2

6

6

6

6

4

7

7

7

7

5



2

 

2  ::: ::: 2

::: ::: ::: 1  



9

::: 2  1

G3 = INxN 

1010



2

& where 

2

 =

(1 � 

2)

The shared error component is modeled as an AR(1) process where errors are correlated within the same job for a given

individual but not across jobs nor across individuals. The person and rm deviation e¤ects reect that some additional,

uncorrelated variation might exist in either the SIPP or the DER or both.

The error vector, e, contains the stacked terms, !111990:::!IN1999,111990:::IN1999. The SIPP and DER errors follow

separate AR(1) processes with the covariance between them constrained to be zero. These errors are identied by di¤erences

in the SIPP and DER earnings reports for each year. The variance matrix for the residuals can be written as

2 2 3 3

1 

2

::: 9 sipp sipp sipp 

sipp 1 sipp ::: ::: 



2

::: ::: 2

sipp sipp sipp 

::: ::: ::: 1 sipp 



9

::: 2 1 sipp sipp sipp 

6

6

6

6

4

7

7

7

7

5

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

4

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

5



2

! 0(N10)(N10)

R = I(N1)(N1) 1010

2 3

6

6

6

6

4

1 

2

::: 9 der der der 

 1 ::: ::: der der 



2

::: ::: 2

der der der 

::: ::: ::: 1 der 



9

::: 2 1 der der der 

7

7

7

7

5



2 0(N10)(N10) 

1010

where sipp and der are the autocorrelation terms of the SIPP (!) and DER () errors, respectively.

Estimates of to 5DER, the variance components (

2



, 

2

; 2; 2, 

2

; 2

0SIP P to 5SIP P , 0DER SIP PDEV DERDEV SIP PDEV DERD 

, 

2

!, sipp, 

2



, der), and realizations of the random e¤ects (, SIP PDEV , SIP PDEV , , SIP PDEV , DERDEV , ) and

the residuals (, !) can be obtained by solving the mixed model equations.

   X0R�1X X0R�1Z   

X0R�1Y 

=

b

Z

0R�1X Z0R�1Z + G�1 Z0R�1

u b Y

The estimation is done by restricted maximum likelihood (REML) using an average information (AI) algorithm, developed

and programmed by Gilmore, Thompson, and Cullis (1995). This method closely follows the Fisher scoring algorithm

proposed by Patterson and Thompson (1971). Parameters are chosen to maximize the log likelihood function by satisfying

a set of rst order conditions, or score equations. Solutions to the score equations are calculated iteratively. The user

furnishes a set of starting values for the variance components and the algorithm calculates the log likelihood and produces

0

initial estimates of the xed e¤ects ( s) and the realized random e¤ects. The information matrix is calculated using an

averaging method that simplies the process for large data sets with multiple random e¤ects. The information matrix is

then used to update the variance component estimates. The process is repeated until the estimates converge.

Our estimation of this model allows us to parse variation due to unobservables into common variation and source-specic

variation. However we cannot talk about measurement error without making an additional assumption: namely what is true

variation? One possible assumption is that all the common components are true variation and the deviations SIP PDEV ; 

DERDEV ; ; ; !; SIP PDEV DERDEV and  are measurement error. Another assumption is that the common variation and

8
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the DER person and rm deviations are true and the SIPP deviations are measurement error. Using both these assumptions

in turn, we calculate the reliability ratio, a summary measure commonly used in the literature that compares true variation

to total variation. If only the common variation is considered true, then the formulas used are as follows:



2 + 2 + 2

 

SIP P = (3)

 

2 + 

2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + ! 

2

 SIP PDEV SIP PDEV 



2 + 2 + 2

 

DER1 =



2 + 

2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 

2

  DERDEV DERDEV  

If the DER person and rm deviations are true variation then the reliability ratios become:



2 + 2 + 2

 

SIP P = (4)



2 + 

2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 

2

  SIP PDEV SIP PDEV ! 



2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2

  DERDEV DERDEV 

DER2 =



2 + 

2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 

2

  DERDEV DERDEV  

A third possible assumption is that all variation in the DER is true in which case DER = 1. Hence these assumptions

provide a range of reliability ratios for the DER data. We will examine this range and consider what can be determined

about the reliability of the survey data versus the administrative data. If the range is small, because DER1 is large, this

will indicate a high level of similarity between the two data sources in unobservables.

4 Results

We begin by comparing average earnings for race-gender-education subgroups. We then look at earnings levels and changes

for welfare recepients and job changers. We estimate a standard earnings equation and compare coe¢cients. After these

four comparisons, we estimate the model described in section 3 and specied in equations 1 and 2 and calculate reliability

ratios for SIPP and DER data.

4.1 Race-Gender-Education subgroups

In Table 12, we present average earnings for white males, white females, non-white males, and non-white females, divided by

a ve category education variable. The education categories are no high school degree, high school degree only, some college,

college degree, and graduate degree. For every sub-group in this table, average earnings are higher in the DER (column 2)

than in the SIPP (column 1). For most groups, the di¤erences become more pronounced as the level of education increases.

For example, white males with no high school degree report earning approximately $12,000 on average in the SIPP. However

in the DER, this same group earns approximately $14,000 on average. This $2000 di¤erence is about 16% of SIPP earnings

(columns 3 and 4). In contrast, white males with a graduate degree earn about $44,000 on average according to the SIPP

while the DER average is almost $59,000. This di¤erence is 33% of SIPP earnings. Thus it appears the largest discrepencies

between the two data sources appear for more not less educated individuals. This trend is also present for white females

and non-white females, although to a lesser extent. For white females, the di¤erences range from 10.6% to 12.7% of SIPP

earnings and for non-white females the di¤erences are between 14.5% and 18.1% of SIPP earnings. For non-white males, the

education groups on either end of scale have the largest di¤erences between SIPP and DER earnings, on average. Individuals

without a high school degree have earnings 21.1% lower in the SIPP while those with a graduate degree have earnings 20.8%

lower in the SIPP.

When comparing across race and gender groups, it appears that SIPP and DER di¤erences are often higher for men than

women and for blacks than whites. However this is not always true nor are all of the di¤erences statistically signicant.

When comparing across white and non-white men, the only signicant di¤erences are in the college degree and graduate

degree categories, where in fact, white men have higher di¤erences between SIPP and DER earnings than non-white men

(23.4 versus 21.9 (signicant at the 10% level) and 33.3 versus 20.8 (signicant at the 1% level)). When comparing white and

non-white women, the only signicant di¤erence is for women without a high school degree (10.6 versus 14.5 (signicant at

the 1% level)). There are more signicant di¤erences when comparing men to women. White men have larger di¤erences

between self-reported and administrative earnings than white women for every education category and these di¤erences are

all signicant5

. Non-white males have higher di¤erences than non-white females but only in the college degree category is

the di¤erence signicant.

5

In di¤erences between white men and white women are all signicant at the 1% level except for the no high school degree category where the

di¤erence is signicant at the 10% level.

9
Standard deviations follow similar patterns to average earnings; they are universally higher in the DER and this di¤erence

varies by education. There seems to be more dispersion in earnings as education levels increase and this is more pronounced

in the DER than in the SIPP. The standard deviations are large due to the presence of a number of high earners in the left

tail of the distribution.

These results are somewhat surprising given that concern about under-reporting earnings has often focused on lowerincome and less educated individuals. In fact it appears that the real systematic di¤erences between the SIPP and the DER

happen for the most educated. One possible reason for this might be that highly educated professionals receive a large part of

their compensation in the form of end-of-the-year bonuses and the SIPP frequently misses these one-time payments. Another

reason might be that highly compensated individuals report a measure of earnings in the SIPP that does not include deferred

compensation or some other form of compensation that these individuals consider separate from wages. However these

earnings are still reported in Box 1 or Box 13 of the W-2 and so show up in total compensation in the DER. The problem

is most pronounced with the highly educated because they are most likely to have these di¤erent types of compensation.

Another possible explanation is missing data imputation. When individuals miss months of the survey in the middle of the

panel, earnings are imputed. Perhaps these imputed earnings are too low or at least contribute to the lower level of variance.

4.2 Welfare Recepients

In Table 13, we look at average earnings summed across jobs for individuals classied based on whether they ever received

welfare in 1996 or 1997, whether they worked in 1996 or 1997, and whether they were single females or not. Individuals in

this table were exclusively from the 1996 SIPP panel. The rst four lines present average earnings for individuals on and o¤

welfare who worked both years and were not single females. The rst row shows average earnings for 309 individuals who

were on welfare at some point in both 1996 and 1997. The next row shows individuals who were on welfare at some point

in 1996 and never on welfare in 1997. The third row shows the reverse: individuals who were never on welfare in 1996 and

on welfare at some point in 1997. The last row shows individuals who were never on welfare in either year. Again, earnings

in the DER are on average higher than in the SIPP. However, changes in earnings are not as far apart as might have been

expected and none of the di¤erences are statistically signicant. For individuals moving o¤ welfare, earnings increased by

21.4% in the SIPP and 24.3% in the DER. For individuals moving onto welfare, earnings decreased between 2% and 6%

for the SIPP and DER respectively. For individuals never on welfare in 1996 and 1997, earnings changes were very similar

- 5.7% versus 5.2%. The results are similar for single females, reported in the second set of four rows. For those moving

o¤ welfare, wages increased by 39% in the SIPP and 35% in the DER. For those moving onto welfare, the earnings change

was -19.8% in the SIPP and -19.1% in the DER. The earnings changes are larger in the SIPP than in the DER for single

females, which is mostly the reverse compared to all others. However since none of these changes are statistically signicant,

one cannot be certain of a unique pattern for single females. The small sample sizes in these various sub-groups make it

di¢cult to obtain much statistical precision.

The next group of results is for individuals who moved o¤ welfare from 1996 to 1997 and started paid employment in

1997 after not working 1996. This group is compared to individuals who started working in 1997 but were not on welfare in

either year. We again divide the group into those who are single females and all others. Here it is quite surprising that for

single females and all others moving o¤ welfare and getting a job, the point estimate of average SIPP reported earnings in

1997 is not very di¤erent from the DER point estimate for the same year. There is also no statistically signicant di¤erence

between the two data sources, something that is less surprising given the small sample sizes. For individuals starting a job

in 1997 who had never been on welfare, there is a statistically signicant di¤erence between SIPP and DER earnings for

individuals who were not single females, with DER earnings being about 29% higher. DER point estimates are higher for

single females not on welfare but the di¤erence between the SIPP and the DER is not statistically signicant.

Finally we look at individuals who move onto welfare in 1997 and have no reported earnings in 1997 after having positive

earnings in 1996. We compare them to individuals who quit earning in 1997 but who were never on welfare. These subgroups have lower SIPP earnings on average than in the DER but for individuals who were not single females, the di¤erence

is only signicant for those never on welfare. For single females starting welfare receipt, SIPP-reported earnings in 1996 are

about 50% lower than in the DER compared to 30% lower for single females not going on welfare. However these di¤erences

are not signicantly di¤erent from zero.

In general earnings levels for welfare receipients are lower in the SIPP than in the DER but the changes in earnings

between years are similar. In some cases the di¤erences between SIPP and DER earnings is actually lower for welfare

receipients as in the case of individuals moving o¤ welfare and beginning to work. Unfortunately the sample sizes are small

and this result will need to be veried in the other SIPP panels.

4.3 Job Changers

In Table 14 we report earnings changes for individual who switch jobs. We dene a job switch as an individual who reports

two consecutive jobs that do not overlap. There may be a gap between the ending date of job 1 and the starting date of

job 2 but the starting date of job 2 cannot come before the ending date of job 1. We allow at most one job switch per

individual. Some individuals have only one job and others have jobs that overlap and these individuals are not included in

10
our table. The rst row shows that on average the SIPP-reported change in earnings after switching jobs is small, about

$40, and is not sigincantly di¤erent from zero. In contrast, in the DER, on average job-changers earn around $900 less in

the second job. However these results di¤er a great deal by industry of the rst and second jobs. The rst group of 15

rows reports earning changes classied by respondent-reported industry of the rst job. Four industries are similar to the

overall average with small earnings gains reported in the SIPP and losses reported in the DER: Construction, Retail Trade,

Personal Services, and Professional Services. Retail Trade is slightly di¤erent than the others in that the DER change is

only -$6 while the SIPP change is over $600. Three other industries report positive changes in earnings from switching jobs -

Agriculture, Business and Repair Services, and Entertainment and Recreation Services. The SIPP reports a higher positive

change for the rst 2 of these industries and is just slightly lower for the last one. These three industries seem to have the

closest SIPP and DER reporting. The remaining seven industries have negative earnings changes between jobs in both the

SIPP and the DER but the changes are substantially smaller in the SIPP than in the DER. For example individuals with

a job in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) industry who switched jobs reported a decline in earnings of just

over $400 in the SIPP but their W-2 records show a decline of almost $2000.

The next group of 14 lines shows earnings changes for individuals classied by the industry of their second job. Here ve

industries have positive SIPP changes and negative DER changes, three industries have positive SIPP and DER changes, and

six industries have negative earnings changes in both data sources. When earnings changes are positive in both sources, the

SIPP report is substantially higher than the DER report (Public Administration, FIRE, and Manufacturing Non-durable).

When both sources report negative earnings changes, the DER is substantially more negative, with the exception of Personal

Services where the change is essentially the same. It is interesting that some industries have di¤erent signs on earnings changes

between the Job1 table and the Job2 table, for example FIRE. This is probably due to the fact that many individuals with

FIRE as their original job industry, have a di¤erent industry at their second job and they earn less in this new industry. For

individuals with FIRE as their second job industry, they may have switched out of a lower-paying industry. This e¤ect is

captured in both the SIPP and the DER although the magnitude of the change is di¤erent between the two data sources.

The last two lines show earnings changes for individuals who do not switch industries and those who do switch industries.

Overall, there do not appear to be signicant di¤erences among industry changers and stayers. Their SIPP-reported changes

in earnings are very similar as well as their DER earnings changes. They follow the overall pattern of the data with slightly

positive earnings gains in the SIPP and larger negative earnings losses in the DER.

Overall it appears that when earnings increase at the time of a job switch, the increase is stronger in the SIPP than in the

DER and when earnings decrease, the decrease is stronger in the DER than in the SIPP. This leads to the SIPP reporting

earnings gains on average while the DER reports earnings losses on average.

4.4 Earnings Regressions

In table 15, we present results from two earnings regressions, one using SIPP data for the dependent variable and the other

using DER data. Our dependent variable is an annualized log wage rate. We calculated this wage rate by dividing total

annual earnings by total annual hours worked. The information on hours comes from the SIPP survey and is used to create

both the SIPP and DER wage rate. For each year, we chose a dominant employer based on earnings and then kept all annual

earnings for that employer. In general this leads to only one observation per person per year but sometimes when employers

overlapped, there were multiple observations per year. The explanatory variables are SIPP variables and are identical in

both regressions. As xed e¤ects, we include an intercept, indicators for the source SIPP panel (1996 is the excluded case),

a linear time trend, interactions of race and gender (white males are the excluded case), interactions of race, gender, and

ve levels of education (no high school degree is the excluded case), and interactions of race, gender, and a piecewise linear

spline in experience. As random e¤ects, we include a person e¤ect and a person/labor force experience interaction and allow

these e¤ects to be correlated. These two terms allow for individual deviations from the overall intercept and from the overall

labor force experience slope due to unobservable individual characteristics. In addition, we include a random rm e¤ect and

specify an AR(1) process for the error term.

The intercepts are remarkably similar for the SIPP and DER regressions but the panel indicators are substantially higher

in the DER than in the SIPP. This means that there is a much larger di¤erence in the overall average mean of SIPP and

DER earnings in the panels conducted in the early 1990s compared to the panel that began in 1996. This di¤erences is

between 5%-10%. Given the fact that the SIPP was re-designed and switched to computer-assisted interviews for the 1996

panel, it is not surprising that the di¤erences between the SIPP and DER are smaller for this panel. The linear time e¤ect

and race and gender interactions are also very similar. The coe¢cient on non-white males is small and positive in the DER

and just barely negative in the SIPP but it is not signicantly di¤erent from zero in either data source. The education

coe¢cients compare di¤erently depending on the demographic group. For white men, the education coe¢cients are slightly

larger in the DER than in the SIPP by between1%-2.5%. The di¤erences for college and graduate degrees are higher than

the di¤erences for high school degree and some college. For non-white males, the education coe¢cients are 1%-4% smaller in

the DER than in the SIPP. White females are similar to white males, with earnings 1%-3% higher in the DER. Non-white

females with a graduate degree have the biggest gap, with the DER coe¢cient being 7% higher than the SIPP coe¢cient.

To better visualize the di¤erences between the labor force experience splines, we have graphed the experience proles of

the four demographic groups using both the SIPP and DER spline coe¢cients. The intercept for each prole is an individual

11
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

in the 1996 SIPP panel with a high school degree. Figure 1 shows results for white men. Initially, the increase in earnings

due to labor force experience accumulation is slower in the DER than in the SIPP. However, by around 14 years, the DER

earnings have caught up and from then on, surpass the SIPP earnings. The gap continues to widen over the later years of an

individuals career. Proles for white women follow a similar pattern, as shown in Figure 2. However, the cross-over point

for the DER and SIPP is not until approximately 25 years of experience. Non-white men have DER earnings well below

SIPP earnings for much of the prole, reecting a lower intercept for non-white men with a high school degree in the DER

than in the SIPP and then lower growth for the rst 2 years. After that the DER growth rate is higher than the SIPP and

earnings cross around 25 years again. For non-white women, the DER growth rate is again lower for the rst 2 years but

after this, the DER catches up very quickly and surpasses the SIPP by year 6.

In general it appears that returns to experience in the rst 2 years are higher in the SIPP than in the DER. For years

3-5, returns are higher in the DER. For years 6-10, the rate of return is quite close for all groups except non-white males

where the DER is substantially higher. For years 11-25 and 26+, the DER is again uniformly higher. Hence it appears

that there is a range over which the e¤ect of labor force experience is very similar between the SIPP and the DER. However

there are also portions of the prole where the e¤ect is quite di¤erent.

Finally at the end of Table 15, we list values for the variance components of the mixed e¤ects models. The main person

e¤ect, or person intercept as we label it in the table, is three times as large in the DER as in the SIPP. This result means

that for this type of regression, person heterogeneity is much higher in the SIPP than in the DER. The person slope, or

interaction of person and labor force experience, is 2.5 times larger in the DER than the SIPP. The rm e¤ect is 3 times

larger in the DER than in the SIPP. Finally, the variance of the error term is signicantly higher in the DER but the AR(1)

correlation coe¢cient is similar in both regressions. DER earnings overall have higher variance and this is reected in the

random e¤ects.

4.5 Reliability Ratios

The models used to estimate reliability ratios are similar to the earnings regressions described in the previous section but

with some important di¤erences. First, the sample of people-job matches used in the estimation is di¤erent. All person-job

matches that have SIPP and DER earnings in some years are used to estimate variance components used for calculating

reliability ratios. We do not select a dominant employer. This is because we want to quantify the sources of variance for all

the data, not estimate economic relationships. Second, we use earnings not wages because it is variation in earnings that is

of interest. Finally, we jointly estimate equations 1 and 2 so that there are some common variance components and some

components particular to either the SIPP or the DER. In Table 16, we show the estimated individual components and then

combine them using the di¤erent reliability ratio formulae given in section 3. The main person and rm e¤ects are .28 and

.32 respectively. The interactions of person and rm and data source produce variance components that go to zero for the

SIPP. Essentially there is no variation left in the SIPP at the person and rm levels after taking account of the variation

that is common to both the SIPP and the DER. However there is additional variation in the DER and DERDEV =.04 and

DERDEV =.1. These magnitudes mean that about 25% of the variation due to unobservable rm characteristics in the DER

is not found in the SIPP and about 10% of the variation due to unobservable person characteristics. The variance in the

SIPP measurement error term is also lower than the DER measurement error term and the SIPP error is less correlated over

time. The common time period component has a higher variance than either measurement error term. The magnitudes

imply that of time period specic variation in the SIPP, 23% is unique to the SIPP and 33% is unique to the DER. We

calculate SIP P = :86 and DER1 = :72. These magnitudes indicate that approximately 70% of total DER variation due to

unobservables is common to both the SIPP and the DER. In the SIPP 86% of total variation is common to both sources.

The higher ratio in the SIPP reects two things. First, overall variation in the SIPP is lower than in the DER. Second, ! 

is smaller than . If we believe that the SIPP is missing variation that is actually true variation, then a higher reliability

ratio is not an indication of less measurement error. If we believe that 

2 and 2

DERDEV are really true variation DERDEV 

then the appropriate reliability measure for the DER is DER2 = :80. Thus the range of ratios for the DER, depending on

how much of the DER variation one is willing to term truth, is :72 � 1: 

If one chooses to adopt the hypothesis that 

2 + 2 + 2

represents true variation and all other variation is measurement   

error of some kind, then the overall level of SIPP variation is 14% too high. However if one chooses instead to adopt the

hypothesis that 

2

 +

2

 +

2 +2

is true variation, then overall variation in the SIPP is too low. The SIP PDEV +

2

SIP PDEV 



2

+

2

+

2

ratio which is the ratio of common variation to true variation under the second hypothesis

2+

2+2 +2 +2

  SIP PDEV SIP PDEV 

is .91 which indicates that about 9% of true variation is missing from the SIPP. If one chooses to believe that all variation in



2+2+2

the DER is truth, then the ratio becomes   which is equal to .72. Under this hypothesis,

2

+

2+2 +2 +2 + 

about 28% of true variation is missing from the SIPP. This later ratio is exactly equal to DER1 but the interpretation is

di¤erent because of the di¤erent assumption made about the DER.

Which hypothesis about the DER to adopt is not answered by the data. However it is interesting to note that  and  

are both relatively large in magnitude. Thus this DER-specic time period e¤ect accounts for more variation than the total

DER person e¤ect and, unlike classical measurement error, it does not immediately die out in the next time period. Because

of these estimates, we hesitate to label  as strictly measurement error and hypothesize that the true reliability ratio of the

 SIP PDEV SIP PDEV 

12
DER is somewhere between :8 � 1 and the SIPP is missing between 9% and 28% of true variation.

5 Conclusion

In comparing the SIPP and the DER we have found two consistent results. DER earnings are on average higher than

SIPP earnings and there is more variation due to unobservables in the DER than the SIPP. Of the denitional di¤erences

discussed earlier, it appears that lack of health insurance premiums and EIN changes are not dominant factors since these

would give rise to lower DER earnings on average. We cannot say for certain how much of the di¤erences we nd might be

due to employee benets appearing on a W-2 form and not on a pay stub. However our opinion is that these di¤erences are

unlikely to be solely the result of the SIPP and the DER measuring di¤erent quantities. In particular, it seems likely to us

that highly educated SIPP respondents with high incomes do under-report their earnings to some extent. Our data on job

changers are particularly interesting in that the major di¤erences between the SIPP and the DER are in earnings changes

not levels.

Our results which examine di¤erences due to unobservables lead us to believe that there is too little variation in SIPP

earnings. Without further research, we cannot give a denite reason why this might be the case. However, we hypothesize

that di¢culty in capturing with-in year uctuations in pay and imputation procedures that use earnings from one wave to

impute earnings values for missing waves contribute to the lower SIPP variation. The SIPP collects earnings at the monthly

level so to some extent there will always be di¢culties in comparing to an administrative database that is annual. In light

of these results, it might be useful to consider ways in which the SIPP could better capture an annual earnings measure that

included bonuses and infrequent extra earnings. Also, an imputation procedure which used the DER to help model SIPP

earnings could reduce the di¤erences between the two sources, by allowing draws for SIPP earnings values to be taken from

a distribution with greater variance.

In spite of the di¤erences we nd, we feel that there are reasons to be condent in the use of SIPP data. Of the variation

that is found in the SIPP, 86% of it can also be found in the DER. Earnings regressions using SIPP and DER data produce

similar coe¢cients. Total earnings changes across years for individuals moving on and o¤ welfare are similar in both the SIPP

and the DER. More work is needed to continue to study e¤ectively measuring earnings using the SIPP survey instrument.

Ideally, the administrative data will continue to inform this study and contribute to SIPP improvements.

References

[1] Abowd, John M. and David Card. 1989. On the Covariance Structure of Earnings and Hours Changes. Econometrica

57(2):411-446.

[2] Abowd, John M. and Lars Vilhuber. 2002. The Sensitivity of Economic Statistics to Coding Errors in Personal Identi-

ers. Technical Paper TP-2002-17, LEHD, U.S. Census Bureau.

[3] Bound, John and Alan B. Krueger. 1991. The Extent of Measurement Error in Longitudinal Earnings Data: Do Two

Wrongs Make a Right?. Journal of Labor Economics 9(1):1-24.

[4] Bound, John, Charles Brown, Greg J. Duncan, Willard L. Rodgers. 1994. Evidence on the Validity of Cross-sectional

and Longitudinal Labor Market Data. Journal of Labor Economics 12(3):345-368.

[5] Duncan, Greg J. and Daniel H. Hill. 1985. An Investigation of the Extent and Consequences of Measurement Error in

Labor-economic Survey Data. Journal of Labor Economics 3(4):508-532.

[6] Fellegi, I.P. and A.B.Sunter. 1969. A Theory for Record Linkage. Journal of the American Statistical Association

64:1183-1210.

[7] Gilmour, Arthur R., Robin Thompson, Brian R. Cullis, Average Information REML: An E¢cient Algorithm for

Variance Parameter Estimation in Linear Mixed Models, Biometrics 51(4):1440-1450.

[8] Newcombe, H.B., J.M. Kennedy, S.J. Axford, and A.P. James. 1959. Automatic Linkage of Vital Records. Science

130:954-959.

[9] Patterson, H.D. and R. Thompson. 1971. Recovery of Interblock Information when Block Sizes are Unequal. Biometrika. 58(3):545-554.

[10] Stinson, Martha H. 2003. Technical Description of SIPP Job Identication Number Editing, 1990-1993 SIPP Panels.

LEHD Technical Paper, U.S. Census Bureau.

13
6 Appendix A Editing of SIPP JOB ID Variable

As described in Section 3.1, the SIPP job id variable had di¢culty in longitudinally tracking jobs (see tables 2, 3A, 3B for

examples of the problems). In the early SIPP panels, the problems were mostly the result of eld representatives being

required to collect information about an on-going job over and over again. Inconsistencies crept in over time as the name

of the employer was collected and written down separately at the time of each interview. Wave-specic names di¤ered both

across and within the original SIPP job IDs. Di¤erent spellings, use of abbreviations in later waves, and slightly di¤erent

wording were the most common di¤erences within job IDs. In contrast, the 1996 panel only recorded employer names when

new jobs were begun and hence employer names di¤ered only across job IDs and not within. In the 1990-1993 panels, the

goal was to create an entirely new set of job IDs that was not derived from the old job IDs because these were deemed

too unreliable. Hence it was necessary to compare all person-job-wave records for a given individual and group those with

the same name. In 1996, however, the goal was simply to check and see if some jobs for an individual should be linked

because an individual may have missed a survey wave and been incorrectly assigned a new job id when he or she was next

interviewed. Hence person-job-wave observations with the same job ID assigned were accepted as belonging to the same

job and job-level records were created. These job-level records were then compared and those with names deemed to be the

same were grouped together.

Because of the spelling and wording di¤erences across observations, we used probabilistic matching methods as developed

by Newcombe, Kennedy, Axford, and James (1959) and Fellegi and Sunter (1969) and implemented in a commercial software

program called Integrity. These methods have been used extensively at the U.S. Census Bureau to solve problems of misscoded identiers (for an example of an application of probabilistic person name matching to x SSN miscodes, see Abowd and

Vilhuber (2002)). This method involves grouping records into blocks of possible matches and then computing matching

weights for pairs of records within the block. Pairs with matching weights above a certain threshold, or cuto¤ point, are

deemed to be matches and those with weights below another threshold are deemed to be non-matches. Those pairs with

matching weights in between the two thresholds are termed uncertain and clerical review is suggested.

A matching weight for a pair of records is a composite score that is created by comparing the records across a variety of

elds, assigning a weight to each eld based on a determination of whether the eld agrees or disagrees, and then summing

the weights from all the elds involved in the comparison. Each eld used in the matching is assigned an m and u probability.

The m probability is the probability that the same eld on two separate records agrees given that the two records were indeed

a match. When this probability is set to less than one, it is assumed that there are some errors in the elds and that even

if two records are a match, there is still some probability that the eld is miscoded on one of the records and the two elds

will disagree. The u probability is the probability that the same eld on two separate records agrees given that the records

are not a match. This is the probability that a eld agrees at random. Given the m and u probabilities, agreement and

disagreement weights for each eld are calculated using the following formulas:

m 

agreement weight = log2

( ) u 

1 � m

disagreement weight = �(log2

( ))

1 � u 

The decision of whether a eld agrees or disagrees, and hence whether it receives the agreement or disagreement weight, can

be implemented in a variety of di¤erent ways. One can be quite strict and insist on absolute identity in order to declare

agreement or one can allow some level of discrepancy between elds without declaring disagreement. This exibility is

especially useful for name matching because it allows the user to take account of potential misspelling of words.

In our application, we blocked on the SIPP person identier and hence only job records for the same person were

compared. To create the elds for comparison we parsed the reported name into several pieces. Common words such as

Inc, Company, or Firm were saved in one set of elds while geography words such as state names were saved in another

set. The remaining words from the name were thought most likely to be unique to a particular employer and were saved in

a third set of elds. We performed several sets of comparisons, or passes, using di¤erent elds in each pass. The choice of

m and u probabilities and cuto¤ levels was determined both by knowledge about the elds and by experimentation. For the

elds that contained unique name words, a high m probability and low u probability were chosen. Since these words were

deemed to be the part of the employer name that was unique to that rm, matching values were essential to matching records,

thus requiring the high m probability. At the same time, these words were unlikely to agree at random and hence produce

false matches, so a low u probability was chosen. The result of these choices was that matching values of the unique word

names received very high agreement weights and also very high disagreement weights. The elds that contained common

words and geography words, on the other hand, had higher u probabilities. Agreement in one of these elds produced a

lower agreement weight because matches were more likely to happen at random while disagreement produced a more negative

disagreement weight because non-matches meant the companies were unlikely to be the same. Cuto¤ values were chosen by

examining certain and uncertain matches and determining the range of their weights. Appendix Table A1 gives the exact

blocking and matching elds used along with their m and u probabilities.

14
For the early SIPP panels, probabilistic name matching alone proved inadequate for creating a consistent set of job IDs.

While the name matching procedure both separated jobs records originally assigned the same job ID and connected job

records originally assigned di¤erent job IDs, the former was the most common outcome. This can be seen in Table 4A

by the fact that the number of total jobs rose substantially after Integrity processing. This result was due to the fact

that the most common problems in the survey were the re-use of job IDs, as described in Table 3B, and the high degree of

irregularity in the spelling of job names and the common use of abbreviations in later waves. Universities and government

agencies with common acronyms were especially problematic. For example, the Integrity software could not recognize the

names University of X and UofX or Department of Y and DOY as being the same. Hence in these panels, a

considerable amount of clerical review was undertaken in order to separate cases where Integrity correctly and incorrectly

split job records. In cases where there were discrepancies between the total job count in the SIPP and the total job count in

the DER, job records were output and reviewed by two separate individuals. When one of the reviewers discovered two jobs

in a respondents job history that appeared to be the same, she manually changed the job ID to reect this determination.

The second reviewer re-checked all these changes as a quality assurance measure. After this extensive manual review, a few

nal edits were performed to locate any nal obvious cases where Integrity had erroneously failed to link job records. The

work history of any person who had one job that consisted of at least four linked job records and a second job that consisted

of only one job record was examined to see whether the single job record in fact belonged to the job with at least four linked

records. Corrections to job IDs were made to link job records that were determined to belong to the same job.

7 Appendix B

The merge between the DER and the Business Register was somewhat complex because the Business Register had two

parts. The rst part was called the Single-unit le and contained records for all EINs that were either single-unit companies

or sub-masters. Single-unit companies were rms with only one establishment that had a single EIN. Sub-masters were

companies with multiple establishments that shared an EIN, i.e. multi-unit companies. For single-unit companies, the

names and industries found on the Single-unit Business Register le were likely to correspond to the names and industries of

employers reported in the SIPP. However for sub-masters, the name and industry were potentially quite di¤erent because

these represented some aggregate concept - name of parent company or major industry out of a group of industries represented

within a multi-unit company. Hence for sub-masters, we also searched for information about the EIN in the second part

of the Business Register, the Multi-unit le. Here we obtained multiple records for each EIN representing the names and

industries of all the di¤erent establishments associated with a sub-master record. For these multi-unit companies, we kept

one record for each unique three-digit industry. Establishments within the same industry tended to have extremely similar

names and hence this choice resulted in both a manageable number of observations to match to SIPP jobs while still providing

additional information that might assist in the match.

The Business Register is maintained on a yearly basis. Initially an EIN from a job was sought in the Business Register

year that corresponds to the rst year the job was reported in the DER. If a job was already in progress at the time of

the beginning of the survey, the start year was coded to be the rst survey year since this was the rst year the job was at

risk to match to the SIPP. If the job was not found in the Business Register year corresponding to the start year, it was

sought in the following two Business Register years. Appendix Table B1 presents a summary of the match rates between

the DER and the Business Register. There are several interesting things to notice in this table. First, the match rates are

extremely high, 98% for every panel except 1996. The low match rate for the 1996 panel relative to the other four panels

can be explained by the fact that the latest year for which the Business Register was available at the time this research was

conducted was 1999. Thus any job in the DER for a SIPP respondent from the 1996 panel that began in the year 2000 could

not be matched to the Business Register. For the purposes of this study, this lack of data did not present a serious problem

because so little SIPP data was collected in 2000 that annual earnings from jobs beginning in 2000 could not be accurately

constructed for SIPP jobs. As described in Section 3.3., jobs beginning in the year 2000 were dropped from both the SIPP

and the DER before comparing earnings. The second interesting thing to note is that although only 27%-32% of all EINs

were multi-unit companies, these EINs accounted for 39%-44% of all jobs. SIPP respondents disproportionately work for

large companies. Third, a small percentage of EINs and jobs were found in the Multi-Unit le but not in the Single-Unit

le. The cause of this is unknown at this time and will need further research.

8 Appendix C

The job-level match between the SIPP and DER data compared employer name, calendar year indicators, and industry in

order to link records from each source. On one side of the match were all the SIPP jobs deemed to be reports of employment

at a single employer. On the other side of the match were all the records associated with the DER jobs deemed to have

taken place during the at-risk time frame. Each DER record contained the name and industry of the EIN as found on the

Single-unit part of the Business Register. When the EIN was also found on the Multi-unit part of the Business Register,

the record contained a second name and industry representing information about a particular establishment of this EIN.

When an EIN was associated with multiple establishments with di¤erent industries on the Multi-unit le, multiple records

15
were created for this DER job. Each record contained the same Single-unit name and industry information but di¤erent

Multi-unit name and industry information. This was done in an attempt to maximize the number of job matches obtained

by using all possible name information associated with multi-unit companies. For example a person might report working

for company X in the SIPP and have a job report in the DER with EIN A that is a multi-unit. The main company name of

EIN A may be Y but one of the subsidiary establishments may be called X. By attaching names X and Y to EIN A in the

DER, we increase the likelihood that this job will match to the SIPP job reported at company X.

Appendix Table C1 gives the blocking and matching elds for each pass along with the accompanying m and u probabilities

for the matching elds. Several variables were also used in multiple passes, with the requirements for matching gradually

relaxed. For example, in the third pass, three-digit Single-unit industry was used as a blocking variable and the four yearindicators were used as matching variables. Pass ve was quite similar except that instead of requiring records to match on

all four year-indicators, only start year was required to match. Start year was a eld that indicated the rst year that a

record was found for this job with the rst possible year being the year that data was rst collected in the survey and the

last possible year being the last year data was collected in the survey. Likewise in pass seven, only one-digit Single-unit

industry was used as a blocking variable. This process enabled the detection of high-probability matches in early passes and

then the addition of lower-probability matches in later passes.

Appendix Table C2 shows the results of the matching. Of the SIPP jobs, between 77%-79% were successfully matched to

a DER job. Of these matches, 86%-88% were deemed high probability matches that surpassed the clerical editing threshold,

while the remaining matches were between the clerical threshold and the no-match cuto¤ point or were duplicate matches.

The majority of the matching took place in the rst pass (between 75%-83% of all matches). The next most successful

passes were 3 (5%-9%) and 7 (5%-6%).

Appendix Tables C3 and C4 highlight two problems that resulted from the matching. First, two di¤erent SIPP jobs

could match to the same DER Job. An example of this type of case is illustrated in Table C3. There were several possible

causes of this problem. First, it was possible that the two SIPP jobs were indeed the same and the SIPP job creation

phase erroneously failed to link them. In this case the duplicate record was a true duplicate and both jobs were correctly

matched to one DER job. However another possibility was that the matching software mistakenly matched a second SIPP

job to the same DER job due to lack of di¤erentiating information for the SIPP jobs. This was particularly likely in the later

passes where matches were based on year and industry indicators alone. In this case, the duplicate was false and only one

of the two matches was correct. Careful inspection of duplicate cases led to the adoption of the following rule: if the two

SIPP jobs had been matched to the one DER job in either the rst or second pass and there were 2 or fewer residual DER

jobs left that had not matched to any SIPP job, then the second SIPP job was declared a true duplicate. It was combined

with the rst SIPP job to become one single SIPP job matched to the one DER job. Otherwise if the two SIPP jobs had

matched to the one DER job in pass 3 or later or they had matched in pass 1 or 2 and there were 3 or more residual DER

jobs, the duplicate was declared false and only the master record match was kept. The duplicate SIPP job was changed to

be a residual, non-matching SIPP job. The total number of duplicates that were determined to be true and hence were

subsequently combined is shown in row 3 of Table 9.

The second problem was the reverse duplication issue: two di¤erent DER jobs sometimes matched to the same SIPP

job. Table C4 gives an example. This type of duplication was more common and it was more di¢cult to know the causes.

The rst possibility was that a company changed its EIN due to a change in ownership structure or some other reason. This

is the successor-predeccessor problem described earlier. Another possibility was that SIPP respondents reported lump

jobs, meaning that one SIPP job was really a combination of several jobs. Since administrative records pertained to the

source of the earnings, it was possible that some individuals considered themselves as holding only one job but were paid

from several di¤erent source EINs. It was also possible that individuals consciously grouped jobs in order to ease the burden

of responding to the survey. These issues warrant further research.

We made a rst attempt to tell whether two DER jobs that matched one SIPP job were indeed the same job by using

some additional information from the Census Business Register. Previously we had augmented our list of EINs from the

DER to include parent company information and name and industry information from one establishment of every unique

three-digit industry group within the parent company. We then added annual geography information (a geocode created

from the exact address) to each EIN at both the parent company level and the establishment level. We compared this

geography information for each year of the survey across the two EINs and if the geocode was ever the same for the parent

company or the establishment, we declared the two jobs to be duplicates. The intent of this geocode comparison exercise

was to nd cases where an EIN changed but the physical location did not change and hence it was likely that the SIPP

respondent still considered himself to be at the same job. Since we did not keep every establishment within an industry

group, we clearly did not compare every possible geocode. Hence our determination of how many DER jobs were duplicates

and should be combined is probably an undercount.

We also added parent company identiers to the EINs so we could tell if two EINs had some kind of ownership relationship.

Two DER jobs that matched to one SIPP job but had the same parent company identier were also declared to be a match.

In this case it seemed possible that the SIPP respondent had kept the same job but had moved within the company or

had simply experienced a company re-organization where the EIN tax reporting structure had changed. Row 4 of Table C2

shows how many DER job duplicates were determined to be legitimate.

16
Table 1: Original SIPP Job Summary

SIPP Panel 1990 1991 1992 1993 1996

Total SIPP respondents 69,432 44,373 62,412 62,721 116,636

Respondents who ever report a job 37,291 23,520 33,920 32,972 63,600

Person-job-wave observations 216,851 136,693 228,214 208,748 498,553

Jobs defined by original SIPP jobid 57,800 35,515 55,453 52,591 136,550
Table 2: SIPP Job ID Problems, 1996 Panel

Wave Start date Jobid

1 Feb. 1, 1996 1

2 Feb. 1, 1996 1

3 Feb. 1, 1996 1

4 Feb. 1, 1996 1

5

6 Jan. 1, 1996 2

Table 3A: SIPP Job ID Problems, 1990-1993 Table 3B: SIPP Job ID Problems, 1990-

Panels 1993 Panels

Failure to link job across waves Failure to separate jobs across waves

Wave Firm Name SIPP Jobid Wave Firm Name SIPP Jobid

1 AAAA 1 1 AAAA 1

2 AAAA 1 2 AAAA 1

3 AAAA 2 3 AAAA 1

4 AAAA 1 4 BBBB 1
Table 4A: Summary of the Job ID Editing Process, 1990-1993 SIPP Panels

SIPP Panel 1990 1991 1992 1993

1 Number of Jobs, post name matching pass 1 78,225 46,316 74,078 68,803

2 Jobs belonging to people with conflict with DER 45,725 24,149 38,752 35,352

3 Number of Jobs, post name matching pass 2 69,138 41,814 66,602 62,251

4 Jobs belonging to people with conflict with DER 10,011 5,106 8,131 8,330

5 Number of Jobs, post clerical edits 66,991 40,818 65,278 61,094

6 Jobs belonging to people with conflict with DER 7,089 3,800 6,448 6,670

Table 4B: Summary of Job ID editing process, 1996 SIPP Panel

SIPP Panel 1996

1 Jobs with startdate probs 29,520

2 Number of Jobs, post name matching 125,358

3 Jobs belonging to people with conflict with DER 15,331

4 Jobs with startdate probs 22,353
1

2

3

4

5

Table 5: Jobs from the DER

SIPP Panel 1990 1991 1992 1993 1996

Total DER jobs 432,105 263,063 364,261 347,485 607,873

Total EINs 235,910 155,013 205,951 197,881 315,471

Years covered by survey 1989-1992 1990-1993 1991-1995 1992-1995 1995-2000

DER jobs in survey time 96,086 58,020 99,524 81,320 192,720

EINs 60,131 38,628 62,406 51,880 105,095
Table 6: Match Rates for People with Jobs in the SIPP and DER

Both

SIPP Panel SIPP DER SIPP DER

1990 People with jobs

Total Jobs held

37,291

66,991

35,032

96,086 55,087

1991 People with jobs

Total Jobs held

23,520

40,818

21,729

58,020 32,447

1992 People with jobs

Total Jobs held

33,920

65,278

31,557

99,524 51,650

1993 People with jobs

Total Jobs held

32,972

61,094

29,831

81,320 47,723

1996 People with jobs

Total Jobs held

63,116

121,450

55,894

192,720 97,149

30,993

19,056

27,394

26,267

48,542

88,324

52,797

90,360

74,317

173,623

Table 7A: Reasons SIPP Workers Do Not Match DER

SIPP People without People Who Have People in SIPP 

SIPP Panel Total SIPP People Valid SSNs Only SIPP Jobs and DER

1990 37,291 4,856 1,442 30,993

1991 23,520 3,629 835 19,056

1992 33,920 5,477 1,049 27,394

1993 32,972 5,535 1,170 26,267

1996 63,116 12,425 2,149 48,542

Table 7B: Reasons DER Workers Do Not Match SIPP

DER People without People Who Have People in SIPP 

SIPP Panel Total DER people Valid SSNs Only DER Jobs and DER

1990 35,032 0 4,039 30,993

1991 21,729 0 2,673 19,056

1992 31,557 0 4,163 27,394

1993 29,831 0 3,564 26,267

1996 55,894 0 7,352 48,542
Table 8: Final Sample of Matched Jobs

SIPP Panel 1990 1991 1992 1993 1996 Total

Number of Matched Jobs after Combining Duplicates 41,885 25,258 39,729 36,469 75,110 218,451

Jobs w/out SIPP and DER Earnings in Sample Years 5,716 3,497 2,706 6,904 2,291 21,114

New Matched Job Total 36,169 21,761 37,023 29,565 72,819 197,337
Table 9: Covariance/Correlation Matrix for Ln(SIPP Job Annual Earnings)

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1996 1997 1998 1999

1990 2.0293 0.61

1991 1.0170 2.0643 0.54

1992 0.8618 1.8204 0.57 0.51

1993 0.9260 1.8653 0.74

1994 0.7042 1.0943 1.9877

1996 2.0875 0.72 0.66 0.63

1997 1.1456 2.0732 0.72 0.66

1998 0.8343 1.0889 2.0162 0.72

1999 0.7060 0.8084 1.0457 1.8932

Notes: Covariances on and below the diagonal; correlations above the diagonal.

Table 10: Covariance/Correlation Matrix for Ln(DER Job Annual Earnings)

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1996 1997 1998 1999

1990 1.9604 0.81

1991 1.1795 2.0640 0.80

1992 1.2313 2.0615 0.80 0.74

1993 1.2486 2.1542 0.79

1994 1.0129 1.2330 2.1987

1996 2.2320 0.80 0.75 0.71

1997 1.3094 2.2750 0.80 0.75

1998 1.0805 1.3083 2.3040 0.80

1999 0.9456 1.0736 1.3284 2.2816

Notes: Covariances on and below the diagonal; correlations above the diagonal.

Table 11: Correlation Matrix of SIPP/DER Job Annual Earnings

Ln(SIPP Job Annual Earnings)

Ln(DER Job Annual Earnings) 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1996 1997 1998 1999

1990 0.74 0.58

1991 0.59 0.75 0.58

1992 0.63 0.77 0.61 0.54

1993 0.71 0.85 0.69

1994 0.67 0.71 0.86

1996 0.85 0.70 0.65 0.61

1997 0.68 0.84 0.68 0.63

1998 0.63 0.68 0.84 0.67

1999 0.60 0.63 0.68 0.83
Table 12: Annual Earnings at a job by demographic and education groups

Average Annual Earnings Standard Deviation

N SIPP DER DIFF %of SIPP SIPP DER

Demo. Group Education level (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

white male no high school 20023 12,203.6 14,217.4 2,013.7 16.5% 12,736.2 15,815.8

high school 46175 19,952.6 23,468.3 3,515.7 17.6% 17,253.8 21,134.5

some college 46870 21,351.2 24,887.4 3,536.2 16.6% 22,863.3 31,646.0

college degree 21658 36,979.3 45,640.2 8,660.9 23.4% 39,136.2 72,316.8

graduate degree 17993 43,997.9 58,639.8 14,641.8 33.3% 41,487.1 229,519.0

white female no high school 14815 6,956.4 7,694.5 738.1 10.6% 7,610.6 8,674.6

high school 45084 12,530.4 13,993.3 1,462.9 11.7% 12,381.0 13,078.5

some college 50330 13,346.6 14,851.8 1,505.2 11.3% 13,958.1 15,687.4

college degree 21004 21,395.3 23,980.2 2,584.9 12.1% 20,044.9 23,918.1

graduate degree 15804 27,348.1 30,833.5 3,485.4 12.7% 27,035.4 41,567.3

non-white male no high school 3362 10,791.9 13,064.1 2,272.2 21.1% 10,315.6 13,100.0

high school 6605 15,738.4 18,652.3 2,913.9 18.5% 13,978.3 16,006.2

some college 6300 17,080.0 19,876.0 2,796.0 16.4% 17,117.0 19,095.0

college degree 2319 28,925.8 35,250.8 6,324.9 21.9% 26,318.5 61,884.6

graduate degree 2031 36,679.7 44,314.2 7,634.5 20.8% 31,895.1 54,168.0

non-white female no high school 3685 7,800.1 8,932.0 1,131.9 14.5% 7,658.3 9,097.2

high school 7767 11,451.9 13,300.9 1,849.0 16.1% 10,107.4 12,960.8

some college 8960 13,246.5 15,179.4 1,932.9 14.6% 13,058.7 14,344.3

college degree 3216 22,125.9 25,625.7 3,499.7 15.8% 19,986.1 21,228.5

graduate degree 2033 28,447.6 33,606.4 5,158.8 18.1% 22,653.9 26,357.2

an observation is an annual earnings report for a person-job match 

individuals may be in this table multiple times if they have multiple jobs

earnings are reported in real 1999 dollar terms 
I I 

I I 

I I 

I I 

Table 13: Welfare Receipients from 1996 panel - Annual Earnings in 1996 and 1997

SIPP DER

Welfare

1996 1997

N Earn 1996 Earn 1997 Change %Change Earn 1996 Earn 1997 Change %Change

all individuals except single females

yes yes

yes no

no yes

no no

309

315

170

21413

9,792.6 10,917.3

13,129.4 15,932.5

15,069.1 14,700.2

26,769.8 28,298.0

1,124.7

2,803.1

-368.9

1,528.2

11.5%

21.4%

-2.4%

5.7%

12,002.0 14,180.4

13,681.0 17,002.7

16,956.7 15,922.8

32,095.6 33,751.3

2,178.4 18.2%

3,321.7 24.3%

-1,034.0 -6.1%

1,655.6 5.2%

single females

yes yes

yes no

no yes

no no

481

203

126

5724

6,078.1 7,581.0

8,475.5 11,815.9

9,525.8 7,641.6

18,003.3 19,438.9

1,502.9

3,340.3

-1,884.3

1,435.6

24.7%

39.4%

-19.8%

8.0%

6,628.3 7,586.6

9,315.9 12,604.7

10,229.2 8,277.2

20,357.8 21,557.0

958.3 14.5%

3,288.8 35.3%

-1,952.0 -19.1%

1,199.2 5.9%

Welfare

1996 1997

N Earn 1996 Earn 1997 Change %Change Earn 1996 Earn 1997 Change %Change

all individuals except single females

yes no

no no

43

1385

none 7,424.0

none 8,921.3

none 7,733.1

none 11,535.5

single females

yes no

no no

30

623

none 6,011.4

none 4,701.8

none 6,008.4

none 5,237.8

Welfare

1996 1997

N Earn 1996 Earn 1997 Change %Change Earn 1996 Earn 1997 Change %Change

all individuals except single females

no yes

no no

33

1448

6,493.1 none

10,085.5 none

8,134.7 none

13,991.0 none

single females

no yes

no no

34

459

3,839.8 none

6,812.1 none

5,681.3 none

8,853.4 none

an observation is the sum of earnings from all jobs for an individual

individuals from 1996 panel only

earnings are reported in real 1999 dollar terms

welfare indicator is "yes" if individual was ever on welfare during the year

welfare indicator is "no" if individual was never on welfare during the year
Table 14: Job changers - earnings comparisons at old and new jobs

SIPP DER

N Earn Job1 Earn Job2 Change Earn Job1 Earn Job2 Change

OVERALL 26241 8265.063 8306.522 41.45894 9685.1804 8768.884 -916.2965

Respondent reported Industry for JOB1

Agriculture 481 4,687.2 5,399.1 711.9 4,736.1 5,242.6 506.4

Mining 121 14,812.0 14,464.0 -348.1 19,362.7 14,922.9 -4,439.8

Construction 1487 10,147.2 10,158.6 11.4 10,353.6 9,982.8 -370.8

Manufacturing Nondurable 1457 10,383.2 9,625.3 -758.0 12,982.5 10,373.5 -2,609.0

Manufacturing Durable 2036 12,724.0 11,024.2 -1,699.9 16,349.8 12,117.4 -4,232.3

Transp., Comm., Public Ut. 1104 11,744.5 11,035.5 -709.0 14,142.9 11,777.3 -2,365.6

Wholesale Trade 936 12,144.8 11,535.7 -609.1 14,277.0 12,079.6 -2,197.4

Retail Trade 8154 4,446.5 5,063.0 616.5 5,225.9 5,219.2 -6.6

Finance, Insur., Real Estate 1270 13,682.7 13,248.9 -433.8 16,719.9 14,811.3 -1,908.6

Business & Repair Services 2212 8,064.1 9,022.0 957.9 8,701.1 9,337.2 636.2

Personal Services 886 5,337.7 5,381.0 43.3 5,490.0 5,243.0 -246.9

Entertain. & Recreation Ser. 666 5,137.4 6,078.3 941.0 5,580.0 6,585.9 1,005.9

Professional Services 4798 9,336.4 9,498.9 162.5 10,711.8 10,050.7 -661.2

Public Administration 555 11,996.7 10,542.2 -1,454.4 14,671.6 12,224.1 -2,447.5

Respondent reported Industry for JOB2

Agriculture 422 5,146.1 5,312.4 166.3 5,339.0 5,053.0 -286.0

Mining 115 16,481.9 16,398.9 -83.0 18,909.6 17,564.1 -1,345.5

Construction 1624 9,673.9 10,127.0 453.1 10,193.3 9,947.5 -245.8

Manufacturing Nondurable 1349 9,334.8 9,996.7 661.9 11,088.6 11,265.4 176.8

Manufacturing Durable 2039 11,455.9 12,120.0 664.1 14,138.8 13,313.5 -825.2

Transp., Comm., Public Ut. 1279 10,069.4 10,575.2 505.7 11,912.6 11,302.8 -609.8

Wholesale Trade 953 10,854.2 12,139.6 1,285.4 13,193.9 13,058.4 -135.5

Retail Trade 7307 4,921.3 4,456.6 -464.8 5,895.1 4,584.9 -1,310.2

Finance, Insur., Real Estate 1354 12,220.5 13,794.5 1,574.0 14,667.6 15,300.2 632.6

Business & Repair Services 2646 9,051.7 8,495.1 -556.6 10,627.5 8,432.2 -2,195.3

Personal Services 818 5,657.2 5,154.6 -502.5 6,002.3 5,537.1 -465.2

Entertain. & Recreation Ser. 620 6,034.1 5,963.6 -70.6 6,442.3 6,124.7 -317.6

Professional Services 5114 9,217.4 8,936.0 -281.4 10,659.0 9,516.0 -1,143.1

Public Administration 582 9,865.6 11,335.4 1,469.7 11,692.4 11,818.2 125.7

Did respondent switch Industries between JOB1 and JOB2?

no switch 11494 9,348.5 9,416.3 67.8 11,041.5 10,166.4 -875.0

switch 14656 7,371.2 7,430.2 59.0 8,555.1 7,670.6 -884.5

an observation is an individual who reports two consecutive, non-overlapping jobs during the SIPP survey

only one job-switch per person is included in the table

earnings are last annual earnings for job1 and first annual earnings for job2

earnings are reported in real 1999 dollar terms
Table 15: Earnings Regressions Comparisons

dependent variable is

annualized log real wage 

0.0119 use all observations for

0.0059 each dominant employer

0.0018 dominant employer is 

0.0119 highest paying employer

0.0051 in at least one year

N 1,641,180 1,617,320

SIPP DER SIPP DER

FIXED EFFECTS Coefficients Standard Errors

non-white female lf exp years 1-2 0.067 0.009 0.0170 0.0287

lf exp years 3-5 0.044 0.068 0.0072

lf exp years 6-10 0.028 0.030 0.0037

lf exp years 11-25 0.011 0.014 0.0011 0.0018

lf exp years 25+ -0.004 -0.001 0.0011

white female lf exp years 1-2 0.077 0.053 0.0071

lf exp years 3-5 0.049 0.053 0.0031

lf exp years 6-10 0.036 0.034 0.0016 0.0026

lf exp years 11-25 0.011 0.015 0.0005 0.0008

lf exp years 25+ -0.008 -0.005 0.0005 0.0007

non-white male lf exp years 1-2 0.100 0.036 0.0191 0.0323

lf exp years 3-5 0.055 0.076 0.0082 0.0134

lf exp years 6-10 0.038 0.045 0.0042 0.0067

lf exp years 11-25 0.012 0.017 0.0013 0.0020

lf exp years 25+ -0.006 -0.004 0.0011 0.0017

white male lf exp years 1-2 0.118 0.063 0.0074 0.0125

lf exp years 3-5 0.062 0.086 0.0033 0.0054

lf exp years 6-10 0.053 0.054 0.0017 0.0027

lf exp years 11-25 0.019 0.022 0.0005 0.0008

lf exp years 25+ -0.010 -0.008 0.0004 0.0006

non-white female high school 0.124 0.158 0.0229 0.0145

some college 0.276 0.293 0.0225 0.0143

college degree 0.623 0.645 0.0287 0.0183

graduate degree 0.790 0.863 0.0320 0.0205

white female high school 0.164 0.188 0.0111 0.0070

some college 0.288 0.298 0.0110 0.0069

college degree 0.596 0.617 0.0131 0.0083

graduate degree 0.748 0.767 0.0139 0.0088

non-white male high school 0.175 0.137 0.0244 0.0154

some college 0.259 0.241 0.0248 0.0156

college degree 0.568 0.551 0.0319 0.0203

graduate degree 0.760 0.728 0.0327 0.0208

white male high school 0.163 0.176 0.0101 0.0064

some college 0.247 0.248 0.0101 0.0064

college degree 0.561 0.586 0.0120 0.0076

graduate degree 0.677 0.700 0.0125 0.0079

non-white female

white female

non-white male

-0.005 -0.008

-0.029 -0.030

-0.001 0.016

0.0518 0.0303

0.0287 0.0169

0.0569 0.0333

linear time effect 0.021 0.033 0.0014 0.0008

panel1993 0.083 0.139 0.0082 0.0051

panel1992 0.100 0.173 0.0083 0.0051

panel1991 0.130 0.233 0.0106 0.0065

panel1990 0.151 0.253 0.0110 0.0067

intercept 1.266 1.250 0.0235 0.0138

RANDOM EFFECTS

person intercept

person slope

correlation

firm effect

variance of residual

AR1 correlation coefficient of residual

0.180 0.540

0.076 0.180

-0.099 -0.270

0.069 0.210

0.160 0.400

0.500 0.450
Table 16: Comparison of unobservable heterogeneity: random effects

person effect

main

SIPPdev

DERdev

0.2814

0.0000

0.0367

firm effect

main

SIPPdev

DERdev

0.3163

0.0000

0.1013

common time period

variance

AR1 correlation

0.7486

0.5737

residual

SIPP variance

DER variance

SIPP AR1 correlation

DER AR1 correlation

0.2171

0.3753

0.2705

0.6365

reliability ratio

SIPP

DER1

DER2

0.8612

0.7240

0.7982
.. 

..... - - --" 

- -

- --~ 

~ ___.........-

ff 

#' 

J(7 

II'/ 

./F 

/ i 

/'/ 

f j 

I I ,~ 

rf 

... 

Figure 1

return to experience

Labor Force Experience Profiles, Job Level: 

White Men

3.05

3

2.95

2.9

2.85

2.8

2.75

2.7

2.65

2.6

2.55

2.5

2.45

2.4

2.35

2.3

2.25

2.2

2.15

2.1

2.05

2

1.95

1.9

1.85

1.8

1.75

years of labor force experience

123456789 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

SIPP white men

DER white men
Figure 2

Labor Force Experience Profiles, Job Level: 

White Women

years of labor force experience

1.7500

1.8000

1.8500

1.9000

1.9500

2.0000

2.0500

2.1000

2.1500

2.2000

2.2500

2.3000

2.3500

2.4000

2.4500

2.5000

2.5500

2.6000

2.6500

2.7000

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

return to experience

SIPP white women

DER white women
Figure 3

Labor Force Experience Profiles, Job Level: 

Non-white Men

years of labor force experience

1.7500

1.8000

1.8500

1.9000

1.9500

2.0000

2.0500

2.1000

2.1500

2.2000

2.2500

2.3000

2.3500

2.4000

2.4500

2.5000

2.5500

2.6000

2.6500

2.7000

2.7500

2.8000

2.8500

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

return to experience

SIPP non-white men

DER non-white men

"- . 

. 

-

..,. IIE"_3 _ _ .., - & 

... -=- 7 

___......-,-~ 

/ y-' 

/ ~ 

/ / 

/ / 

/ / -+-

/ I ......... 

f I 

I I 

f I 

I 1 

' / 

A 
Figure 4

Labor Force Experience Profiles, Job Level: 

Non-white Women

years of labor force experience

1.7500

1.8000

1.8500

1.9000

1.9500

2.0000

2.0500

2.1000

2.1500

2.2000

2.2500

2.3000

2.3500

2.4000

2.4500

2.5000

2.5500

2.6000

2.6500

2.7000

2.7500

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

return to experience

SIPP non-white women

DER non-white women
Appendix Table A1:

First Round of Job Name Matching, SIPP Panels 1990-1993

Description of Person-Job-Wave observation matching by pass

Blocking Variables Matching Variables m, u prob. cutoffs

Pass 1 Person ID Full employer name* .9, .02 2, .3

Pass 2 Person ID Fields from employer name*: 2, .3

word one .9, .15

word two .95, .6

word three .95, .6

word four .95, .6

qualifier word one .95, .6

qualifier word two .95, .6

type word one .95, .6

type word two .95, .6

SIPP original job id number .6, .5

Pass 3 Person ID Fields from employer name*: 5, .05

Array: first 4 words .95, .6

word one .9, .15

qualifier word one .95, .6

qualifier word two .95, .6

type word one .95, .6

type word two .95, .6

*Jobs with missing names were excluded from this round of name matching
Appendix Table A1 (continued):

Second Round of Job Name Matching, SIPP Panels 1990-1993

Description of Person-Job-Wave observation matching by pass

Blocking Variables Matching Variables m, u prob. cutoffs

Pass 1 Person ID Fields from employer name: .1, .1

full name**

array: first 4 words .9, .1

Array: first 2 qualifier words .9, .15

Array: first 2 type words .9, .15

Geo word .7, .5

Pass 2 Person ID Full employer name** .95, .1 .1, .1

Job Name Matching, SIPP Panel 1996

Description of Person-Job record matching by pass***

Blocking Variables Matching Variables m, u prob. cutoffs

Pass 1 Person ID Full employer name** 2, .15

Pass 2 Person ID Fields from employer name: 2, .15

full name**

word one .9, .15

word two .95, .6

word three .95, .6

word four .95, .6

qualifier word one .95, .6

qualifier word two .95, .6

type word one .95, .6

type word two .95, .6

geo word .7, .5

Pass 3 Person ID Fields from employer name: 2, .15

full name**

Array: first 4 words .95, .6

word one .9, .15

qualifier word one .95, .6

qualifier word two .95, .6

type word one .95, .6

type word two .95, .6

geo word .7, .5

**When no weights were assigned, complete employer name was included but given

zero weight unless it was blank and then the full disagreement weight was assigned. 

This was used to prevent jobs with blank names from matching. If weights were

assigned, full disagreement weight was also assigned if name was missing.

***Job records with observations in the same wave were disqualified from matching to

each other because the same job could not be reported on twice in the same wave.
Appendix Table B1: DER Match to the Business Register

SIPP Panel DER Total

Match to

Business Register Single-Unit File Multi-Unit File

1990 EINs 60,131 58,991 98.10% 58,255 96.88% 16,990 28.25%

Jobs 96,086 93,520 97.33% 92,379 96.14% 37,807 39.35%

1991 EINs 38,628 38,096 98.62% 37,686 97.56% 12,497 32.35%

Jobs 58,020 56,725 97.77% 56,118 96.72% 24,526 42.27%

1992 EINs 62,406 61,391 98.37% 60,777 97.39% 19,361 31.02%

Jobs 99,524 96,982 97.45% 96,029 96.49% 43,197 43.40%

1993 EINs 51,880 50,839 97.99% 50,376 97.10% 17,029 32.82%

Jobs 81,320 78,933 97.06% 78,198 96.16% 35,977 44.24%

1996 EINs 105,095 95,122 90.51% 94,438 89.86% 28,923 27.52%

Jobs 192,720 172,832 89.68% 171,585 89.03% 82,546 42.83%
Appendix Table C1: 

Description of SIPP Job to DER Job Matching Algorithm by Pass

Blocking Variables Matching Variables m, u prob. cutoffs

Pass 1 Person ID Fields from SU name: 2, .3

Array: first 4 words .95, .1

Array: first 2 qualifier words .9, .3

Array: first 2 type words .9, .3

Geo word .7, .5

year indicators* .75, .3

Complete SU name**

Pass 2 Person ID Fields from MU name: 2, .3

Array: first 4 words .95, .1

Array: first 2 qualifier words .9, .3

Array: first 2 type words .9, .3

Geo word .7, .5

year indicators* .75, .3

Complete MU name**

Pass 3 Person ID year indicators* .9, .3 2, .3

3-digit SU Industry

Pass 4 Person ID year indicators* .9, .3 2, .3

3-digit MU Industry

Pass 5 Person ID start year*** .9, .3 2, .3

3-digit SU Industry

Pass 6 Person ID year indicators* .9, .3 2, .3

1-digit SU Industry

Pass 7 Person ID year indicators* .9, .1 2, .3

3-digit SU Industry .9, .1 2, .3

*Year Indicators by Panel

1990: 1990, 1991, 1992

1991: 1991, 1992, 1993

1992: 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995

1993: 1993, 1994, 1995

1996: 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999

**Complete employer name was included but given zero weight unless it was blank

and then the full disagreement weight was assigned. This was used to prevent jobs

with blank names from matching in the first 2 passes.

***Start year was first year during survey time frame when job was observed in the

SIPP or DER.
Appendix Table C2: SIPP Jobs matched to DER Jobs

1990 1991 1992 1993 1996

SIPP SIPP DER SIPP DER SIPP DER SIPP DER 

Jobs DER Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs

1 Master Match 37,207 37,207 22,513 22,513 34,593 34,593 32,289 32,289 66,366 66,366

2 Clerical Match 4,678 4,678 2,745 2,745 5,136 5,136 4,180 4,180 8,476 8,476

3 Duplicate Match on SIPP side 529 294 490 436 971

4 Duplicate Match on DER side 907 609 1,007 771 1,920

5 Total Matches 42,414 42,792 25,552 25,867 40,219 40,736 36,905 37,240 75,813 76,762

6 Match Rate 76.99% 48.45% 78.75% 48.99% 77.87% 45.08% 77.33% 50.11% 78.04% 44.21%

7 Percent of Matches that are Master 87.72% 86.95% 88.11% 87.03% 86.01% 84.92% 87.49% 86.71% 87.54% 86.46%

8 Residual Job (non-match) 12,673 45,532 6,895 26,930 11,431 49,624 10,818 37,077 21,336 96,861

9 Total Jobs 55,087 88,324 32,447 52,797 51,650 90,360 47,723 74,317 97,149 173,623

Appendix Table C3: Example of Duplicate Match on SIPP Side

DER SIPP

Type of Match EIN Jobnum

Master Match A 1

Duplicate Match on SIPP side A 2

Appendix Table C4: Example of Duplicate Match on DER Side

DER SIPP

Type of Match EIN Jobnum

Master Match A 1

Duplicate Match on DER side B 1