Wage Estimation Using Data from the National Compensation Survey and the Occupational Employment Statistics Program

• Activity Number: 442
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 6, 2013 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Michael Lettau*+ and Dee Zamora
• Companies: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Keywords: small-area estimation ; imputation ; wages

Abstract

Two statistical programs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the National Compensation Survey program (NCS) and Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) program, collect and report information about the hourly wage rates of workers by occupation. In the past, the calculation of the wage estimates from these two programs has been largely separate even though the resulting estimates can appear to measure essentially the same thing for a very similar set of workers. Therefore, this article describes a procedure that combines data from the NCS and the OES to produce an experimental set of wage estimates by area, occupation, and job characteristic. The procedure is based on benchmarking the NCS sample weights to OES employment totals, thereby "harmonizing" the two sets of wage estimates. It is then augmented with an imputation procedure to ensure that a wage estimate can be produced for every area and occupation group, even when the number of observations from the NCS survey is small.