Hi Jeff! I’ve been looking at the 1976-2010 retrospective proximity swap file and while the merge appears straightforward, it is not the same length as the underlying CPS file. Only individuals with at least one king of income above the top-coding threshold are contained in the fils, and it appears the merger is to be done on YEAR, SERIAL, PERNUM.
The swap replacement file still has top-coded values in it for about one percent of the people. Do you know anything about this? Although income values are reported as high as 1.7 million dollars for some income types, top-coded values of 99997 are still identifiable because they do not conform to 2-digit rounding. I have not checked data more recent than 2011 yet. If there are still top-coded values dispite swapping that makes me unhappy.