The 2006 Earnings Public-Use Microdata File: an introduction.

This article introduces the 2006 Earnings Public-Use File (EPUF) and provides important background information on the file's data fields. The EPUF contains selected demographic and earnings information for 4.3 million individuals drawn from a 1-percent sample of all Social Security numbers issued before January 2007. The data file provides aggregate earnings for 1937 to 1950 and annual earnings data for 1951 to 2006. The article focuses on four key items: (1) the Social Security Administration's experiences collecting earnings data over the years and their effect on the data fields included in EPUF; (2) the steps taken to "clean" the underlying administrative data and to minimize the risk of personal data disclosure; (3) the potential limitations of using EPUF data to estimate Social Security benefits for some individuals; and (4) frequency distributions and statistical tabulations of the data in the file, to provide a point of reference for EPUF users. Selected Abbreviations BEPUF Benefits and Earnings Public-Use File EPUF Earnings Public-Use File IRS Internal Revenue Service MEF Master Earnings File QC quarter of coverage SSA Social Security Administration SSN Social Security number YOB year of birth Introduction This article introduces the 2006 Earnings Public-Use File (EPUF), a data file containing earnings records for individuals drawn from a 1-percent sample of all Social Security numbers (SSNs) issued before January 2007. EPUF is the latest public-use data file released by the Social Security Administration (SSA) to contain earnings data from its administrative files. EPUF comprises a much larger sample than previously released public-use files containing earnings histories, and significantly enhances the ability of researchers and policy analysts to analyze SSA programs. EPUF consists of two linkable files. One contains selected demographic and aggregate earnings information for all 4,348,254 individuals in the file, and the second contains annual earnings records for the 3,131,424 individuals who had positive earnings in at least 1 year during 1951-2006. EPUF data reflect capped Social Security taxable earnings. As such, the earnings data contained in EPUF do not present complete measures of the number of workers or the amount of wage-and-salary and self-employment income in the US economy. The data fields included in EPUF are nearly identical to those in SSA's most recent public-use file containing administrative earnings, the 2004 Benefits and Earnings Public-Use File (BEPUF). This was done (1) to address the critical need to meet data disclosure standards, (2) because of the complexity of the earnings data that SSA has collected over the life of the program, and (3) to maximize EPUF's timeliness. SSA plans to continue working on data disclosure standards for several key detailed earnings data fields from its administrative files. Combining this work with direct feedback from EPUF users, SSA hopes to include new data fields in future releases. This article informs potential users about the EPUF and provides background information about the data contained in the file. Specifically, the article discusses SSA's experiences collecting earnings data over the years and the effect of those experiences on the data fields included in EPUF; the steps taken to "clean" the data and to minimize the risk of personal data disclosure; and the potential limitations of using the data to estimate benefits for some individuals. Finally, the article presents frequency distributions and statistical tabulations of the data to provide points of reference for EPUF users. Developing the Earnings Public-Use File In 2006, SSA released BEPUF, a data file based on a systematic random 1-percent sample of all individuals who were receiving Social Security benefits in December 2004. The file contains benefit and earnings information for the 473,366 individuals in the sample. …