Abstract The Current Population Survey (CPS) is the source of official US labor force statistics. The wording of the CPS employment questions may not always cue respondents to include informal work in their responses, especially when providing proxy reports about other household members. In a survey experiment conducted using a sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk respondents, additional probing identified a substantial amount of informal work activity not captured by the CPS employment questions, both among those with no employment and among those categorized as employed based on answers to the CPS questions. Among respondents providing a proxy report for another household member, the share identifying additional work was systematically greater among those receiving a detailed probe that offered examples of types of informal work than among those receiving a simpler global probe. Similar differences between the effects of the detailed and the global probe were observed when respondents answered for themselves only among those who had already reported multiple jobs. The findings suggest that additional probing could improve estimates of employment and multiple job holding in the CPS and other household surveys, but that the nature of the probe is likely to be important.

中文翻译：

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探索非正式工作活动

摘要当前人口调查（CPS）是美国官方劳动力统计数据的来源。CPS就业问题的措词可能并不总是会提示受访者在他们的回答中包括非正式工作，尤其是在提供有关其他家庭成员的代理报告时。在使用Amazon Mechanical Turk受访者样本进行的调查实验中，进一步的调查确定了CPS就业问题未涵盖的大量非正式工作活动，既包括无工作者，也包括基于CPS答案被雇用的人。问题。在为另一位家庭成员提供代理报告的受访者中，与那些接受更简单的全球调查的人相比，接受额外调查的人在系统上发现非正式工作的比例要大得多。当受访者只回答那些已经报告过多项工作的人时，就会发现详细调查和全球调查的效果之间存在相似的差异。研究结果表明，额外的调查可以改善CPS和其他家庭调查中的就业和多份工作的估计，但是调查的性质可能很重要。