Imputing Income in the Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey

Although the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has imputed income in the Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey since 2004, imputed income data for previous years are unavailable. By closely mimicking the BLS imputation methodology, we address this gap by imputing income back to 1984. In this article, we describe our methodology and provide descriptive results showing the relative quality of our imputation. Our data and the statistical programs used to generate them will eventually be shared with the research community.