Description

EMPSAME indicates whether or not the respondent was employed by the same employer and the same job he/she reported working as his/her main job in the previous month's survey.

There are a large number of people in all samples who appear to be in-universe for EMPSAME, that is, they are currently employed and were employed in the previous month, but still have NIU values for EMPSAME.

Prior to 2007, it may be that these individuals did not report the name of their employer in the previous month and are thus not asked this question in the current month. Unfortunately, as employer names are not included in the public use data, there is no way to verify this.

While these NIUs are present in all samples, there is a marked increase in the share of eligible respondents who are missing values for this variable in 2007. Fujita et al. provide evidence that this increase is due to a change in the CPS interviewing protocol that does not allow enumerators to share a respondent's responses to previous interviews with other members of the household without the respondent's consent. This rule combined with dependent interviewing methods used to gather occupation and industry information led to a large increase in missing information for this variable.

Comparability

In the June 2015 sample, all persons in month-in-sample two are NIU for EMPSAME. This is present in the original CPS data. Additionally, it was identified that participants who abstain from responding to the survey for a month still provide valid EMPSAME responses upon resuming. The available documentation from the original CPS data suggests that such occurrences should not be possible. There are no apparent linkage problems or unidentified contextual factors that could account for this phenomenon. Further investigation is being done to identify the samples affected. This variable is otherwise comparable across available years.

Universe

Flags

Unharmonized Variables

• UH_SAMEJOB_B1