Hello,
I am using the 2019-2023 ACS 5yr sample. My analysis is at the individual level and geographic level is US states. When I calculate median INCWAGE or INCTOT, with or without perwt by state, I get some very unusual results. For example, the median wage for those living in California is $25,957 and those living in Nebraska is $29,497, which does not seem right. In my dataset I have filtered out individuals under 25. Applying this filter, the values of 999999 and 999998 do not exist in the data and individual topcoded income remain present for each state. So I’m not sure what is going on here. Seems like I am doing something wrong. Any suggestions?
The universe tab for INCWAGE notes that in the ACS this variable is reported for all persons age 16+. Significantly, there is no requirement that someone must be employed to receive an INCWAGE value. Your specification therefore likely includes a lot of people who did not earn any wage or salary income and have a zero value for this variable.
You might consider restricting your analytical sample to those with INCWAGE values > 0 (i.e., earned any wage or salary income in the preceding 12 months), or more narrowly to those with EMPSTAT = 1 (i.e., employed in the week preceding the survey). The first case will include those who worked for just part of the year as well as those who worked part time; you can additionally use UHRSWORK (usual hours worked per week) and WKSWORK1 (weeks worked last year) to focus your analysis on full time workers. When I run this analysis using the INCWAGE > 0 restriction in our online analysis tool (see the screenshot of the inputs into the tool below), the median annual wage/salary income estimate for California comes at $52,673.
Note that if you do not require individual-level microdata for your analysis, the geographically aggregated ACS summary data tables available through our spatial data project, IPUMS NHGIS, may be of interest.
That makes sense, thank you so much. Would you know if there is a reason for why so many individuals in California have reported 0 income?