Employer–firm relationships: US-first plan, evaluation gates, and two-workstream split

Employer–firm relationships in Populace (US-first)

📊 Visual plan (live): https://employer-firm-plan.vercel.app

Per Max's ask, this is the plan for attaching job spells with employer attributes to the Populace dynamic person panel — US first, following the ECPS recipe (impute from panel data → calibrate to administrative aggregates) and this repo's evaluation discipline (pre-registered gates, noise floors, one-shot candidate runs). The plan has been through two independent adversarial reviews (a data-claims audit with every source web-verified, and a modeling/precedents review against DYNASIM, MINT, PENSIM, Census SSB/SynLBD, AKM/BLM); rev 1 of the page incorporates both.

Architecture

flowchart LR
  subgraph A["Workstream A — Daphne (person side)"]
    SIPP["SIPP job-level panel<br/>job IDs, tenure, industry,<br/>establishment size (not firm)"]
    CPS["CPS ASEC + tenure supp.<br/>NOEMP = true firm-size label"]
    PSID["PSID / NLSY<br/>long-horizon tenure"]
    IMP["microimpute QRF<br/>spells onto CPS persons +<br/>transition hazards (phase 1)"]
    SIPP --> IMP
    CPS --> IMP
    PSID --> IMP
  end
  subgraph B["Workstream B — Vahid (firm side)"]
    MARG["SUSB · BDS · CBP · SynLBD<br/>firm-type margins & dynamics"]
    FLOW["QWI · J2J · JOLTS · BED<br/>flow & earnings aggregates"]
    REG["BLM firm-type register<br/>(types, not firm IDs)"]
    MARG --> REG
  end
  MATCH["match layer (interface)<br/>C1 spell schema is the contract;<br/>calibrated to QWI/J2J,<br/>disjoint from gate cells"]
  IMP --> MATCH
  REG --> MATCH
  FLOW --> MATCH
  HARNESS["dynamics harness<br/>E1–E12 battery, noise floors,<br/>pre-registered gates"]
  PE["PolicyEngine-US<br/>employer-keyed rules (ESI, mandates)"]
  MATCH --> HARNESS
  MATCH --> PE

Phasing

• Phase 0 (static): employer attributes (industry, firm-size class, tenure) imputed onto CPS persons; calibrated to SUSB. Enough for firm-size-threshold policy cross-sectionally.
• Phase 1 (dynamic): job-spell transition hazards (separation, hire, job-to-job, destination attributes) trained on SIPP, scored against SIPP holdouts, calibrated to QWI/J2J.
• Phase 2 (two-sided, gated): BLM-style firm-type register — firm types (industry × size × state), not firm identities, since rosters are unidentified from public margins. Goes ahead only if phase-1 gates pass and the E12 identification story holds; otherwise claims scope down to firm-size-keyed policy only.

Evaluation criteria (to be pre-registered, gates.yaml style)

E1–E12 battery (full table on the live page), highlights:

Protocol rules from review: calibration cells pre-registered disjoint from gate cells; a SIPP-vs-J2J seam-reconciliation run before thresholds lock; noise floors before any threshold number.

Key review findings already folded in

1. SIPP 2014+ measures establishment size, not firm size (EJB1_EMPSIZE is location size) → CPS ASEC NOEMP is the firm-size training label.
2. QWI publishes mean earnings, never medians → E7 restated on means.
3. QWI/J2J dimensions are pairwise-restricted (firm size XOR firm age; one demographic pair; sub-sector industry × size at state level only).
4. No one has published a credible synthetic matched US employer–employee file — Census released synthetic persons (SSB) and synthetic establishments (SynLBD) but never the link. Phase 2 would be first; the paper must say so.

Division of labor

Two independent workstreams meeting at three frozen interface contracts (details on the live page):

• @daphnehanse11 — Workstream A (person side): SIPP job-level reader (label-verified, family.py pattern), CPS NOEMP/tenure loaders, harmonized PSID/NLSY tenure series, QRF spell imputation, phase-1 transition hazards; owns SIPP noise floors and gates E3–E5, E8–E10 plus the seam-vs-J2J reconciliation run. Deliverable to B: the person panel emitting spells in the frozen C1 schema.
• @vahid-ahmadi — Workstream B (firm side): external-target pipeline (SUSB/BDS/CBP/QWI/J2J/JOLTS/BED extracts committed with provenance notes), canonical firm-size banding decision (C2), calibration with the target/gate partition, BLM firm-type register; owns gates E1, E2, E6, E7, E11, E12 and the aggregate-side floor studies.

Interface contracts: C1 spell schema and C2 canonical firm-size banding freeze in week 1 (changed only by joint PR); C3, the jointly-authored employer gate block, locks after a referee round in week ~4 — no one-shot candidate runs before C3 locks. Sync points are weeks 1, 4, and ~11 (phase-2 go/no-go); everything else is asynchronous — A can develop against fixture spells, B against a synthetic C1-conforming file.

cc @MaxGhenis — process update: plan built, adversarially reviewed twice (data claims + modeling/precedents), revised, split into the two workstreams above, and deployed for browsing at the Vercel link on top. Next concrete step is the week-1 items: readers + ADR (A), target pipeline + banding proposal (B).

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