Research Note on Linking CPS ASEC Files

Measuring change over time in areas such as family structure, employment, income, and poverty is of great interest to social scientists. The panel component of the Current Population Survey (CPS) affords the opportunity to observe short-term change in these areas. The Annual Social and Economic supplement (ASEC), with its wealth of information on income, health insurance coverage, benefits receipt, and many other topics, is a particularly popular resource for this purpose. However, commonly used methods for linking CPS ASEC files do not address how to link the ASEC oversample records across years, leading to smaller linked sample sizes. We demonstrate how to recover the linkable oversample cases in the 2005-2020 ASEC, resulting in about 150,000 more linked records (between 13,000 and 19,000 yearly) which represents a 30% increase in the overall linked sample size.