Measuring the Economic Impact of Pennsylvania Youth in Transition: Linking Information from Education, Training, and Social Programs to Unemployment Insurance Records

Abstract

Measuring employment status, wages, geographic and wage mobility, and education and training program impacts in youth labor markets is difficult. Locating and maintaining contact with youth for measurement is problematic. Geographic mobility and the difficulty and expense of survey–based approaches to collecting school participation and labor market information from youth are plagued by non–response as well as response errors and biases. Described in this report are opportunities for using Unemployment Insurance (UI) administrative records to solve the difficult problem of collecting information about the labor market experiences of youth in transition from school to work.

Administrative records from the UI program provide microdata about a state’s employers and employees. Self–employed individuals, military personnel, federal government employees, railroad employees, and independent contractors are excluded from these data and are not part of the UI system. Employers provide a Quarterly Contribution Report for each month of every quarter that contains a summary of the number of employees, total wages paid to these employees, and contributions made to the UI system at a worksite. Employers also provide a separate document, called a wage record report, that contains information about individual employees. Listed in the wage record report are each employee’s name, social security number, and wages for the quarter. The social security number is a major linking identifier. Beyond the primary administrative uses of these data for the UI program, the linked records can constitute an important resource for labor market researchers. Aided by improved information technology and by procedures for protecting the confidentiality of employers and employees, linked wage records are being mined by researchers to, for example, document training successes, examine job retention rates, explore wages of new hires, and follow the geographic mobility of workers.

Pennsylvania makes limited use of UI data for labor market research. In general, though, using these data to conduct research on the labor force dynamics of Pennsylvania youth would entail four steps: (a) obtaining data about the youth cohort; (b) providing data to Pennsylvania’s Center for Workforce Information & Analysis (CWIA) for linking; (c) conducting record linking through the CWIA; and (d) delivery of linked data from the CWIA to researchers.

Keywords: youth employment, record linkage

JEL Classification: J49