Research Note on Linking CPS ASEC Files.

Measuring change over time in areas such as family structure, employment, income, and poverty is of great interest to social scientists. The panel component of the Current Population Survey (CPS) affords the opportunity to observe short-term change in these areas. The Annual Social and Economic supplement (ASEC), with its wealth of information on income, health insurance coverage, benefits receipt, and many other topics, is a particularly popular resource for this purpose. However, commonly used methods for linking CPS ASEC files do not address how to link the ASEC oversample records across years, leading to smaller linked sample sizes. We demonstrate how to recover the linkable oversample cases in the 2005-2020 ASEC, resulting in about 150,000 more linked records (between 13,000 and 19,000 yearly) which represents a 30% increase in the overall linked sample size.

Immigrant Legal Status among Essential Frontline Workers in the United States during the COVID-19 Pandemic Era.

Emerging evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has extracted a substantial toll on immigrant communities in the United States, due in part to increased potential risk of exposure for immigrants to COVID-19 in the workplace. In this article, we use federal guidance on which industries in the United States were designated essential during the COVID-19 pandemic, information about the ability to work remotely, and data from the 2019 American Community Survey to estimate the distribution of essential frontline workers by nativity and immigrant legal status. Central to our analysis is a proxy measure of working in the primary or secondary sector of the segmented labor market. Our results indicate that a larger proportion of foreign-born workers are essential frontline workers compared to native-born workers and that 70 percent of unauthorized immigrant workers are essential frontline workers. Disparities in essential frontline worker status are most pronounced for unauthorized immigrant workers and native-born workers in the secondary sector of the labor market. These results suggest that larger proportions of foreign-born workers, and especially unauthorized immigrant workers, face greater risk of potential exposure to COVID-19 in the workplace than native-born workers. Social determinants of health such as lack of access to health insurance and living in overcrowded housing indicate that unauthorized immigrant essential frontline workers may be more vulnerable to poor health outcomes related to COVID-19 than other groups of essential frontline workers. These findings help to provide a plausible explanation for why COVID-19 mortality rates for immigrants are higher than mortality rates for native-born residents.

Extending Current Population Survey Linkages: Obstacles and Solutions for Linking Monthly Data from 1976 to 1988.

The Current Population Survey (CPS) has been the nation's primary source of information about employment and unemployment for decades. The data are widely used by social scientists and policy makers to study labor force participation, poverty, and other high-priority topics. An underutilized feature of the CPS is its short-run panel component. This paper discusses the unique challenges encountered when linking basic monthly data as well as when linking the March basic monthly data to the Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) Supplement in the 1976-1988 period. We describe strategies to address linking obstacles and document linkage rates.

Cost of Living Variation, Nonmetropolitan America, and Implications for the Supplemental Poverty Measure.

Poverty scholarship in the United States is increasingly reliant upon the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) as opposed to the Official Poverty Measure of the United States for research and policy analysis. However, the SPM still faces several critiques from scholars focused on poverty in nonmetropolitan areas. Key among these critiques is the geographic adjustment for cost of living employed in the SPM, which is based solely upon median rental costs and pools together all nonmetropolitan counties within each state. Here, we evaluate the current geographic adjustment of the SPM using both microdata and aggregate data from the American Community Survey for 2014-2018. By comparing housing costs, tenure, and commuting, we determine that median rent is likely an appropriate basis for geographic adjustment. However, by demonstrating the wide variability between median rents of nonmetropolitan counties within the same state, we show that the current operationalization of this geographic adjustment could be improved through the use of more-specific categories such as metropolitan adjacency or Rural Urban Continuum Codes.

Across the Rural-Urban Universe: Two Continuous Indices of Urbanization for U.S. Census Microdata.

Microdata from U.S. decennial censuses and the American Community Survey are a key resource for social science and policy analysis, enabling researchers to investigate relationships among all reported characteristics for individual respondents and their households. To protect privacy, the Census Bureau restricts the detail of geographic information in public use microdata, and this complicates how researchers can investigate and account for variations across levels of urbanization when analyzing microdata. One option is to focus on metropolitan status, which can be determined exactly for most microdata records and approximated for others, but a binary metro/nonmetro classification is still coarse and limited on its own, emphasizing one aspect of rural-urban variation and discounting others. To address these issues, we compute two continuous indices for public use microdata-average tract density and average metro/micro-area population-using population-weighted geometric means. We show how these indices correspond to two key dimensions of urbanization-concentration and size-and we demonstrate their utility through an examination of disparities in poverty throughout the rural-urban universe. Poverty rates vary across settlement types in nonlinear ways: rates are lowest in moderately dense parts of major metro areas, and rates are higher in both low- and high-density areas, as well as in smaller commuting systems. Using the two indices also reveals that correlations between poverty and demographic characteristics vary considerably across settlement types. Both indices are now available for recent census microdata via IPUMS USA (https://usa.ipums.org).

Using the Annual Social and Economic Supplement as Part of a Current Population Survey Panel.

The Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) is the most widely used type of Current Population Survey (CPS) data, but it is cumbersome to use the ASEC as part of a longitudinal CPS panel, especially linking to non-March months. In this paper, we detail the challenges associated with linking the ASEC to monthly CPS data, outline the creation of an identifier that links the ASEC and the March Basic Monthly data from 1989 through 2017, and provide substantive examples that illustrate the value of combining the ASEC with monthly data. The variable, MARBASECID, which we created to link ASEC and March monthly CPS data, represents a significant contribution to social and economic data infrastructure, saving individual researchers from having to duplicate the effort required to create linkages between ASEC and monthly CPS data.