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National Experimental Well-Being Statistics Technical Note on Methodological Changes for Version 2

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Working Paper Number: SEHSD-WP2025-01

The National Experimental Well-Being Statistics (NEWS) project aims to produce the best possible income and poverty statistics given all available survey, decennial census, administrative, and third-party data. In our first paper (Bee et al., 2023a), we released improved estimates of income and poverty statistics for 2018 by addressing bias from nonresponse, missing information and measurement error. This paper expands the income definitions from pretax money income to 1) disposable income, 2) a resource measure inclusive of non-health means-tested in-kind benefits, and 3) the income concept used for estimating the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). In addition, this release implements several improvements, most importantly: 1) we estimated federal and state taxes and credits, 2) we integrated additional administrative data on means-tested program benefits, 3) we updated our model for combining survey and administrative earnings to better estimate the unobserved true earnings distribution given the earnings reported across data sources and the other observable characteristics of individuals. The paper describes the process by which we implement these improvements and summarizes key results.

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Page Last Revised - January 23, 2025
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