Why are Measures of Aggregate Hours Worked by the Unincorporated Self-Employed So Volatile?
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Self-employment hours, as measured using the Current Population Survey (CPS), occasionally vary widely from one quarter to the next, and these variations can result in large fluctuations in measures of quarterly labor productivity produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In this paper, we examine whether certain aspects of the CPS sample design, including sample weighting, the rotation group framework, imputation methods, and proxy-reporting, are associated with these large variations. We find that volatility in the number of self-employed is much higher when comparing changes in self-employment among workers who are not in the sample in two consecutive quarters compared with those who are in the sample in consecutive quarters. In addition, proxy-responses make larger contributions to self-employment growth in more quarters than do self-responses, and month-to-month changes in class-of-worker status occurring with transitions between proxy- and self-responses in the CPS panel contribute to increased volatility. Finally, imputed self-employment is more volatile than nonimputed self-employment, but there are few imputed responses.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it