Gross flows estimation from the Survey of Income and Program Participation

The paper focuses on one of the main longitudinal surveys conducted by the US Bureau of the Census, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP); specifically it regards the problem of estimating gross flows in the labour market when data are affected by classification errors. Some data analysis presented in the paper show that typical sources of errors in longitudinal data, like time-in-sample effect, do not affect SIPP observed gross flows dramatically. The so-called seam effect dominates on other phenomena that potentially bias gross flows observed by means of longitudinal surveys. On the basis of this evidence, a strategy to correct labour force flows observed with SIPP from classification errors is proposed. The strategy is an ad hoc specification of latent class analysis.