I recently read an IPUMS working paper “Unraveling Geographic Complexities in the Current Population Survey” by David Van Riper, Sarah Flood, and Finn Roberts (September 2021). In this paper, the authors talked about imputing missing county-level fips code using the spatial relationships among metropolitan areas, cities, and counties. So, I wonder in my most recent data extract (April 2022), is the variable “COUNTY” the raw county-level fips or the imputed version? If not, is there any variable or data flag associated with county-fips imputation available?
Forgot to mention that I am using the CPS basic monthly microdata from 2019 to 2021.
The COUNTY variable does not contain imputed values. The IPUMS CPS team does plan to add imputed county data to the database eventually, but there is no definite timeline for doing so.