Analysts have historically relied on slate personal income (SPI) as the benchmark for comparing state spending on public goods and services and levels of state taxes. This occurs despite the widely acknowledged shortcomings of using SPI as a measure of fiscal capacity, a state's ability to raise...

This article introduces the 2006 Earnings Public-Use File (EPUF) and provides important background information on the file's data fields. The EPUF contains selected demographic and earnings information for 4.3 million individuals drawn from a 1-percent sample of all Social Security numbers...

This article describes a new methodology developed by the Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics (ORES) of the Social Security Administration (SSA) to indicate the state and county of residence, date of birth, and sex of nearly all workers for whom tax records provide earnings data in a...