Hello everyone,
While working with the variable INCWAGE I often come across extremely small values which I have a hard time interpreting. In particular, I encounter values of incwage within the 1-10 interval for some observations in the 1988-92 and 2015-19 samples, as well as values within the 11-100 range. Considering that INCWAGE represents annual income, should I consider these values as actual values of individual annual income, or do they represent or flag something else in the data? Has anyone encountered a similar issue and found a way to interpret these values?
Thank you!
INCWAGE indicates each respondent’s total pre-tax wage and salary income–that is, money received as an employee–for the previous calendar year. Looking across all years of the ASEC, the largest total number of persons with INCWAGE values between 1-10 is 251 in 1961. In 1988-forward, there are <50 persons with INCWAGE values between 1-10. These values in INCWAGE should be considered valid as reported by the respondent. Additionally, remember that users must adjust for inflation using Consumer Price Index adjustment factors. You may be interested in using INCTOT which reports each respondent’s total pre-tax personal income or losses from all sources for the previous calendar year (see the comparability section of INCTOT for more information on which income sources are included and their corresponding variables). I may also suggest looking at wage and salary values in combination with other income, occupation or demographic variables, as factors such as weeks worked last year (WKSWORK1), age (AGE), and occupation (OCCLY) will likely affect wage and salary.
Thank you very much for clarifying!