The 2006 Earnings Public-Use Microdata File: an introduction

This article introduces the 2006 Earnings Public-Use File (EPUF) and provides important background information on the file's data fields. The EPUF contains selected demographic and earnings information for 4.3 million individuals drawn from a 1-percent sample of all Social Security numbers issued before January 2007. The data file provides aggregate earnings for 1937 to 1950 and annual earnings data for 1951 to 2006. The article focuses on four key items: (1) the Social Security Administration's experiences collecting earnings data over the years and their effect on the data fields included in EPUF; (2) the steps taken to "clean" the underlying administrative data and to minimize the risk of personal data disclosure; (3) the potential limitations of using EPUF data to estimate Social Security benefits for some individuals; and (4) frequency distributions and statistical tabulations of the data in the file, to provide a point of reference for EPUF users.     

Historical Estimates of Total Taxable Resources for U.S. States, 1981-2000

Analysts have historically relied on slate personal income (SPI)as the benchmark for comparing state spending on public goodsand services and levels of state taxes. This occurs despitethe widely acknowledged shortcomings of using SPI as a measureof fiscal capacity, a state's ability to raise revenues fromits own sources. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has developeda more comprehensive measure of fiscal capacity, Total TaxableResources (TTR). Treasury has generated official estimates ofTTR since 1992 and has used two distinct methodologies to doso. The lack of a time series using a single methodology andcurrent estimates of income and production in the United Statesrepresents a significant barrier to the widespread use of TTRfor analytical purposes. This research note generates a timeseries (1981–2000) using Treasury's current methodologyfor estimating TTR and the latest estimates for income andproductionin the United States.