An approach to longitudinally matching Current Population Survey (CPS) respondents

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Madrian, Brigitte C.^{a; *} | Lefgren, Lars John^b

Affiliations: [a] University of Chicago and National Bureau of Economic Research, Chicago, IL, USA | [b] University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Correspondence: [*] University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business, 1101 E. 58th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. Tel.: +1 773 702 8079; Fax: +1 773 702 0458; E-mail: brigitte.madrian@gsb.uchicago.edu

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an approach for evaluating the trade-offs inherent in different approaches used to match Current Population Survey (CPS) respondents across various CPS surveys. Because there is some measurement error in both the variables used the identify individuals over time and in the characteristics of individuals at any point in time, any procedure used to match CPS respondents has the possibility of both generating incorrect matches and failing to generate potentially valid matches. We propose using the information contained in the variable on whether an individual lived in the same house on March 1 of the previous year as a way to gauge these trade-offs. We find that as measured by reported residence one year ago, increasing the fraction of ``invalid'' merges that are rejected usually comes at a cost of decreasing the fraction of ``valid'' merges that are retained. However, there are clearly some approaches that are superior to others in the sense that they result in both a higher fraction of ``invalid'' merges being rejected and a higher fraction of ``valid'' merges being retained.

DOI: 10.3233/JEM-2000-0165

Journal: Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 31-62, 2000