Assessing the Quality of Imputing Full-time Work Status Using Earnings Thresholds

Melanie Wallskog

CES Technical Notes Series from Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau

Abstract: Researchers commonly impute workers’ full-time work status using an earnings floor (see e.g., Card, Heining, Kline (2013), Song et al. (2019), Sorkin (2018), Sorkin and Wallskog (2023)). While these earnings floors are easy to implement, as researchers often simply keep workers earning above some threshold (often the federal minimum wage at 35 or 40 hours per week for some weeks of the year), they could naturally be subject to measurement error (for example, part-time workers with high hourly wages). In this report, I analyze the scope of this misclassification by combining worker-level earnings data from the LEHD with reported hours worked from the ACS.

Keywords: ACS; LEHD (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-08
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