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Description

For all persons, INCWAGE reports the total income they received from wages or salary, tips, commissions, or bonuses during the current calendar year. Using the reported income information, annual income amounts were then edited and imputed for every record on the full-year file. Please refer to the IPUMS user note on Income Data in MEPS for more information on the collection, editing (including top- and bottom-coding), and imputation of income variables in MEPS, as well as changes to the target population for income data collection over time. Users may also be interested in the data quality flag, QINCWAGE, which reports the editing methods used for INCWAGE.

If respondents needed more information about what types of income to report as wage and salary income, they were provided with the additional guidance: "This includes all income from wages, salary, commissions, and bonuses and is shown in Box 2 of the tax filer's W-2 form. Tips, scholarships, fellowship grants, and dependent care benefits should also be included." INCWAGE may be edited based on round-level employment data for persons who were both working for pay and reported earning zero dollars of income.

Information on the IPUMS defined-universe for this variable[show more]

Users may wish to note that, while IPUMS defines the universe for this variable as all persons, certain persons were explicitly targeted to answer questions about specific income sources. In addition to the target population of persons who were asked specifically about wage income, all persons in the household were eligible to list additional income from "other" sources, which includes income from sources previously asked about in the survey (such as wage income). It is unclear if wage income reported as an "other" income source is counted in wage income or "other" income. Because all persons could technically report wage income via the "other" income questionnaire item, IPUMS staff report the universe for INCWAGE as being "All Persons." Users may also wish to note that in the original public use MEPS data files, no income variables have cases explicitly coded as out of universe; both persons who directly report earning zero dollars of income from a source and persons who are not explicitly asked about that income source have values of zero.