Using a large data set that links individual Current Population Survey (CPS) records to employer-reported administrative data, we document substantial discrepancies in basic measures of employment status that persist even after controlling for known definitional differences between the two data sources. We hypothesize that reporting discrepancies should be most prevalent for marginal workers and for marginal or nonstandard jobs, and we find systematic associations between the incidence of reporting discrepancies and observable person and job characteristics that are consistent with this hypothesis. The paper discusses the implications of the reported findings for both micro and macro labor market analysis.

This special issue uses harmonized, individual-level panel data to study how COVID-19 school closures affected labor supply of parents of school-age children in Canada, Germany, Russia, Korea, Sweden, Australia, and China. Using comparable measurement and a generalized difference-in-differences approach—including triple-differences estimates and estimators that account for heterogeneous and dynamic treatment effects—we conclude that, overall, despite vastly different societal contexts, parents worldwide and American parents responded to school closures similarly (Hansen et al. 2026. J. Human Resources 61, no. 4:1295). As schools closed, mothers, but not fathers, substituted time away from the labor market and toward childcare.

Good information on self-employment is needed to inform the ongoing discussion of the rise of the gig economy and its implications for workers. Tax data show significant growth in self-employment not captured in the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS-ASEC). The growing gap reflects both self-employment in tax data missing from the CPS-ASEC and self-employment misreported as wage and salary work. We document consistent patterns in the discrepancies between the tax and survey data but are able to explain only a modest share of the growing disagreement between them.

The article structually estimates an on‐the‐job search model of job separations. Given each employer pays observably equivalent workers the same but wages are dispersed across employers, an employer's separation flow is the sum of an exogenous outflow unrelated to the wage and a job‐to‐job flow that decreases with the employer's wage. Using data from the Danish Integrated Database for Labour Market Research, the empirical results imply, as predicted by theory, that search effort declines with the wage. Furthermore, the estimates explain the employment effect, defined as the horizontal difference between the distribution of wages earned and the wage offer distribution.