Analyzing the Dynamics of Program Participation with Data from the SIPP1

Research on economic need in the United States dates back at least to Jacob Riis's classic 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives. In the century since that publication, government efforts to reduce poverty have expanded enormously. Along with the expansion of anti-poverty programs, the demand for research on the nature of economic need in this country has mushroomed. A primary motivation for beginning the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) was to provide more and better information on families' level of eco­ nomic need and their use of government programs. This paper analyzes the ex­ tent to which SIPP has fulfilled that promise and presents recommendations for further changes and improvements in SIPP that might make it more useful to those who want to investigate poverty and anti-poverty programs. Data on income and program participation serve four basic functions in un­ derstanding poverty. First, income statistics are used to calculate measures of economic need, such as the official poverty rate, which are used as a measure of economic and social progress. Second, comparative measures of economic need across different subgroups of the population provide a measure of the relative progress and well-being of different groups in society, and help focus attention on those whose needs remain unmet. Third, data on program partici­ pation and family income provide information on who receives government transfer income and on how effective these programs are in reducing economic need. Fourth, repeated observations over time provide evidence on how all of these issues evolve. In particular, as anti-poverty programs and the macro

One of the methods of increased privacy protection is the creation of synthetic data sets. In this article we consider the differences that emerge between synthetic and nonsynthetic data in one of the very few attempts to create a synthetic data file for a major household survey data set, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The data we use are nonsynthetic and synthetic versions of the SIPP linked to administrative earnings histories, known as the SIPP Gold Standard File (GSF) and the SIPP Synthetic Beta (SSB), respectively. We present a set of results on short-run earnings dynamics estimated on both the SSB and the GSF, focusing on earnings volatility—the variance of short-run earnings growth rates—as well as an error components decomposition of inequality into permanent and transitory components. We find that short-run instability—both volatility and the transitory component of earnings inequality—is higher in the SSB than the GSF although the differences are somewhat dependent on modeling choices and the treatment of low earnings. Differences between the two data sets emerge both because cross-sectional inequality is higher in the SSB than in the GSF and because the dynamics of earnings over both shorter and longer periods appear to be different.

We propose a new methodology that does not assume a prior specification of the statistical properties of the measurement errors and treats all sources as noisy measures of some underlying true value. The unobservable true value can be represented as a weighted average of all available measures, using weights that must be specified a priori unless there has been a truth audit. The Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) survey jobs are linked to Social Security Administration earnings data, creating two potential annual earnings observations. The reliability statistics for both sources are quite similar except for cases where the SIPP used imputations for some missing monthly earnings reports.

Guardianship and the Representative Payee Program

When debating the effect of undocumented immigrants on the economy, scholars often presume that undocumented immigrants are wage laborers rather than business owners. This study imputes the legal status of Mexican and Central American immigrants (MCAs) in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) between 1996 and 2008 to evaluate how legal status affects business ownership patterns. From 1996 to 2008, the SIPP asked a series of questions about business ownership and migration history that make it uniquely suited to an investigation of undocumented MCA business owners. Instrumental variables regressions reveal that undocumented immigrants had a lower likelihood of owning a business than documented immigrants, but undocumented and documented business owners derived similar incomes from their businesses. A lack of legal status may hold back potential entrepreneurs. MCA business owners of both legal statuses clustered into similar low-paying, low-growth industries, however, so regardless of legal status, there are likely limits to how much business ownership can promote economic mobility among MCAs. All told, scholars should do more to acknowledge the existence of undocumented immigrant business owners, measure their impact on the economy, and examine their influence on immigrant incorporation patterns.

Undocumented status is widely recognized as an important social determinant of health. While undocumented immigrants have lower levels of health care access, they do not have consistently poorer physical health than the US-born or other immigrant groups. Furthermore, heterogeneity by race/ethnicity has been largely ignored in this growing literature. This paper used the 2001, 2004, 2008 panels of the restricted Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), one of the only representative surveys equipped to adequately identify Asian undocumented immigrants, to compare health patterns between Asians and Latinos by immigration status. We examined three general measures of health/health access: self-rated health, disability, and current health insurance. Latino undocumented immigrants displayed some advantages in self-rated health and disability but had lower insurance coverage compared to US-born Latinos. In contrast, Asian undocumented immigrants did not differ from US-born Asians in any of the three outcomes. While undocumented status has been proposed as a fundamental cause of disease, we found no evidence that Latino and Asian undocumented immigrants consistently fare worse in health access or physical health outcomes than immigrants in other status categories. Different racial groups also appeared to have unique patterns between immigration status and health outcomes from one another.

Although a vast amount of literature on the characteristics of public assistance recipients exists, little is known about the characteristics of the clientele of nonprofits that provide material assistance. This study examines the question of who receives material assistance from nonprofits. Three panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (1996, 2001, and 2004) adult well-being module were used to see if the use of nonprofit assistance is associated with individual and household characteristics, type of material hardship, and the use of other sources of assistance. Results show that poverty status, education, area of residence, and public program participation have a significant association with nonprofit material assistance, regardless of the type of material hardship and the use of other sources of assistance. These associations stayed relatively stable during the years of observation. It is interesting that households headed by an individual with college education were more likely than those headed by an individual without a high school diploma to receive material assistance from nonprofits. These findings may help nonprofits develop appropriate assistance programs and reach target populations. KEY WORDS: low-income households; material assistance; material hardship; nonprofits; social service ********** Material hardship is a condition of failure to meet the minimum levels of very basic goods and services, such as food, housing, and medical needs (Beverly, 2001, p. 143). In the United States, one in every 10 people lives in material hardship (Beverly, 2001). To help those with material hardship, government at various levels and nonprofit groups provide a wide range of material assistance. During the recent economic downturn, the need for material assistance rose and an increasing number of people turned to nonprofits for assistance (Ducey, 2009). Despite the important role of nonprofits in social assistance historically and currently (for example, Allard, 2008; Lipsky & Smith, 1989; Young, 1999), little is known about the clientele of the nonprofit sector (Allard, 2008). Two reasons may account for this. First, nonprofit assistance is still small in size and scope relative to public assistance, although this is changing as the partnership between government and nonprofits grows (Salamon, 1995; Young, 1999). Second, as noted by Allard, the local nature of service providers poses a challenge to research on nonprofit groups, and this is partly reflected by the lack of nationally representative data on the use of nonprofit assistance by individuals. Despite how little we know about the clientele of the nonprofit sector, a huge gap can be seen in the extent of material hardship and the availability of material assistance to the needy. Because of this, nonprofits are expected to play a larger role in social assistance to the needy (Alexander, Nank, & Stivers, 1999; Salamon, 1995). For this to happen, we need to look closely at who receives material assistance from nonprofits and what factors are associated with the use of nonprofit assistance. An inquiry into these questions will not only benefit nonprofits as they try to develop appropriate assistance programs and reach target populations, but also inform policymakers of the similarities and differences between the clientele of the nonprofit sector and that of the public sector. The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which incorporates questions regarding nonprofit assistance, makes it possible to closely study the clientele of nonprofit assistance. Three panels of the SIPP (1996, 2001, and 2004) were used by the current study to examine the characteristics of nonprofits' clients and the determinants of the use of nonprofit assistance by families with material hardship. BACKGROUND Theoretical Perspectives As is widely recognized, nonprofit assistance is distinct from other sources of assistance, such as government, family, and friends. …

Summary Review of Data Sources for School to Work Transitions by Youth with Disabilities - Policy Brief

Entrepreneurs base their decision to start a business on a range of factors, from age, education and assets to macroeconomic conditions. While the majority of these factors have a well-understood impact on entering and exiting self-employment, the effect of macroeconomic conditions is less clear. During periods of recession, self-employment may increase due to its attractiveness as an alternative to unemployment. However, the difficulty of maintaining a business through the downturn can lead to a decrease in the self-employed. Understanding the transitions in and out of self-employment would help us better appreciate how entrepreneurs experience recessions. We use a robust set of longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to analyze the movements between self-employment, unemployment and wage-work during the Great Recession. The results suggest that the probability of entering self-employment depends on characteristics of the individual while movements out of self-employment are contingent on characteristics of the business. Furthermore, transitions from unemployment to self-employment increased during the recession months and transitions from self-employment to wage-work increased in the post recession months.

The authors use data from the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to investigate whether employer-provided health insurance reduced worker mobility (a phenomenon termed job-lock). The SIPP provides information on variables--particularly pension receipt, job tenure, and spouse job change--that were omitted from previous surveys and are, the authors argue, key to the estimation of well-defined mobility models. For dual-earner married men and women, the authors estimate a model that accounts for the interaction between husbands' and wives' job change decisions. For both married and single individuals, the results provide fairly strong evidence of job-lock among women, but only weak indications of job-lock among men. The authors speculate that this finding reflects higher health care use by women than by men.

The average age of grandparents in the U.S. in 2022 was 68 years. Grandparenthood is more common among older adults (aged 65 and older) than those in midlife (aged 40-64). In 2022, the percentage of older adults who were grandparents (67%) was more than 2.5 times greater than the percentage among those in midlife (24%). Data from the 2023 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) are used to update Wu, 2018 & Westrick-Payne, 2023 comparing midlife grandparents to those at older ages across demographic characteristics in 2022. The SIPP is a nationally representative household-based survey that directly asks respondents if they are a grandparent, making it one of the few national surveys that identify non-resident grandparents. This profile is number three in our 2024 series on grandparents in the U.S.

In this paper, we consider the role of all work limiting health conditions on divorce behavior but we distinguish between less (exogenous) predictable versus more (endogenous) predictable shocks. We divide the reported health conditions in the 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) into those that appear to arrive randomly conditional on age for married men and women versus those that appear to be more predictable. The six work limiting health conditions that appear to arrive largely exogenously are cancer, carpal tunnel syndrome, deafness or serious trouble hearing, paralysis, thyroid trouble and tumor cyst or growth. How the onset of work limiting conditions then affects divorce is studied across different demographic groups. The primary result of the study is that the onset of health problems that are unpredictable generally does not increase the likelihood of divorce while the divorce behavior is closely related to the onset or evolution of a broader, arguably endogenous set of health conditions. However, the patterns of response are shown to vary by race and ethnicity. For example, the onset of health conditions that do appear to be statistically related to demographic factors known to correlate with poor health behaviors appear to be associated with a statistically significant increase in the probability of divorce particularly among minority (Black and Hispanic) groups. The data used in the study are drawn from the SIPP, particularly from the topical module on “work disability history”, and the retrospective histories are used to construct a panel over the individuals’ lives. The primary estimation method is a panel linear probability model with fixed-effects.

The self-reported number of workdays missed due to injury or illness, or sick days, is a reliable measure of health among working-aged adults. Although sick days is a relatively underexplored health-related outcome in migration studies, it can provide a multidimensional understanding of immigrant wellbeing and integration. Current understandings of the association between migration status and sick days are limited for two reasons. First, in the United States, few nationally representative surveys collect migration status information. Second, researchers lack consensus on the most reliable approach for assigning migration status. We use the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine sick days and draw comparisons between two methods for assigning migration status—a logical approach and a survey approach. The logical method assigns migration status to foreign-born respondents based on characteristics such as government employment or welfare receipt, while the survey approach relies on self-reported survey responses. Sick days among immigrants was correlated with and predicted by other health conditions available in the SIPP. Comparisons of sick days by migration status vary based on migration assignment approach. Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs) reported more sick days than non-LPRs and appear less healthy when migration status is assigned using the logical approach. The logical approach also produced a gap in sick days between LPRs and non-LPRs that is not replicated in the survey approach. The results demonstrate that if migration status is not measured directly in the data, interpretation of migration status effects should proceed cautiously.

The average age of grandparents in the U.S. was 67 years.Grandparenthood is more common among older adults (aged 65 and older) than those in midlife (aged 40-64).In 2021, the percentage of older adults who were grandparents (71%) was more than 2.5 times greater than the percentage among those in midlife (33%).Data from the 2021 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) are used to update Wu, 2018 comparing midlife grandparents to those at older ages across demographic characteristics.The SIPP is a nationally representative household-based survey that directly asks respondents if they are a grandparent, making it one of the few national surveys that identify non-resident grandparents.This profile is number 2 in our 2021 series on grandparents in the U.S.

Federal survey data collection identifies people with disabilities predominantly by using a 6-question sequence asking about different functional impairments known as the American Community Survey-6 (ACS-6). However, little is known about the specific diagnoses identified by the ACS-6 or whether they vary across demographic subgroups. To characterize the disability diagnoses identified by the ACS-6 and assess to what extent they identify a consistent population across demographic subgroups. This cross-sectional study among people with disabilities responding to the 2023 or 2024 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) assessed the prevalence of 36 different diagnosis groupings in the ACS-6 as a whole and within each of the individual questions, as well as how the identified diagnoses varied by age group, race and ethnicity, sex, and educational attainment, with further disaggregation by cognitive disability status. Data were analyzed between August 1 and September 15, 2025. Identification as people with disabilities using the ACS-6. Diagnoses reported by survey respondents as causing the functional impairments they listed in the SIPP. A total of 13 341 people with disabilities (52.2% female; mean [SD] age, 53.0 [23.0] years) responding to the SIPP were included. Among people with disabilities aged 22 to 64 years, the most common diagnoses were anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorders (prevalence, 15.6%; 95% CI, 14.5%-16.9%), depression (15.3%; 95% CI, 14.1%-16.5%), unspecified musculoskeletal issues (13.5%; 95% CI, 12.5%-14.6%), back or spinal problems (11.6%; 95% CI, 10.6%-12.6%), and unspecified neurologic disorders (10.8%; 95% CI, 9.8%-11.8%). The most common disability diagnoses reported by respondents identified by the ACS-6 were different across age groups but similar across demographic groups defined by sex, race and ethnicity, and educational attainment. The results of this cross-sectional study suggest that the ACS-6 identifies a similar population across demographic subgroups not characterized by age but highlight substantial heterogeneity in the population of people with disabilities within these subgroups and across age groups. Contemporary debates regarding future revisions to disability data collection in federal population surveys should address the ability to account for this heterogeneity in survey design.