Contemporaneous vs. Retrospective Unemployment: Through the Filter of Memory or the Muddle of the Current Population Survey?

Phillip Levine

No 656, Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section.

Abstract: This paper documents and attempts to explain the observed disparities between unemployment rates computed from contemporaneous and retrospective CPS data. The maintained hypothesis is that the discrepancies are consistent with different definitions of unemployment between the two measures. The longitudinal nature of the CPS, which allows a respondent's answers to be matched between one year and the next, is exploited to examine two commonly expressed shortcomings in the contemporaneous definition. I find that relative to the retrospective measure, more workers with weak labor force attachment are considered unemployed in the contemporaneous rate. In addition, discouraged workers, who are classified as out of the labor force according to the contemporaneous definition, may be counted as unemployed in the retrospective.

Keywords: unemployment rates; measurement error; current population survey; CPS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H41 H42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1990-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://dataspace.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/dsp016395w709f/1/276.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Internal Server Error

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:indrel:276

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bobray Bordelon ().