This repository contains data, computer code, and documentation (the 'package') that are being made available by the Congressional Budget Office to allow researchers to replicate CBO's adjustments for underreporting of receipt and benefit amounts from selected means-tested transfer programs in data sets from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) of the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS).

For a description of CBO's method for imputing transfer receipt, see How CBO Adjusts for Survey Underreporting of Transfer Income in Its Distributional Analyses by Bilal Habib, Analyst in CBO's Tax Analysis Division.

The imputations are available for four of the largest means-tested transfer programs:

• Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP),
• The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),
• Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and
• Federal housing assistance.

The imputations can be merged with the CPS ASEC files from 1980 to 2022. Those files represent information for calendar years 1979 to 2021. See the section called "Merging CBO's Means-Tested Transfer Imputations With CPS ASEC Data Sets" in ./docs/data_contents.md for more information on how to merge the outputs of this analysis with CPS ASEC data sets.

NOTE:
These imputations were designed specifically for CBO's analyses of the distribution of household income, which primarily group households into income quintiles (fifths).

These imputations should not be used for state-level analyses, causal analyses, or policy simulations.

The code was written and tested using Stata/IC 14.2 for Windows (64-bit x86-64), although it may be compatible with previous versions of that program. (Further information about Stata can be found at https://www.stata.com.)

See ./docs/algorithm_description.md for information on how the algorithm works.

To run the programs:

1. Click on the green Code button at the top of this GitHub repository and either clone the repo to your computer or dowload a compressed zip file of the entire repo and extract the contents of the zip file to your computer.

2. Open the main Stata file: ./source_code/impute_means_tested_transfers_MAIN.do.

3. In the SET PATH VARIABLES section of that file, uncomment line 18 and enter the full file path to the source_code directory in this repo, which you saved to your computer in step 1.

4. Execute the code. Run times will vary, but it should take approximately 10 minutes to run on a typical computer.

5. When execution is complete, a new set of output files will have been saved in the ./outputs/data and ./outputs/diagnostics directories. (Note that each exection of ./source_code/impute_means_tested_transfers_MAIN.do overwrites the previous set of output files.)

   See ./docs/data_contents.md for details about the contents of those output files.

Questions about the data, computer code, and documentation may be directed to CBO's Office of Communications at [email protected].

CBO will respond to inquiries as its workload permits.