Estimation of panel correlations for the Canadian Labour Force Survey - ARCHIVED

The Canadian Labour Force Survey uses the rotation panel design. Every month, one sixth of the sample rotates and five sixths remain. Hence, under this rotation scheme, once a rotation panel enters in the sample, it stays 6 months in the sample before it rotates out. Because of this design feature and the way of selecting the rotate-in panel, the estimates based on the panels in the same or different months are correlated. The correlation between two panel estimates is called the panel correlation. Three kinds of panel correlations are defined in this paper: (1) the correlation (denoted by \rho) between estimates for the same characteristic based on the same panel in different months; (2) the correlation (denoted by \gamma) between estimates of the same characteristic based on geographically neighboring panels in different months; (3) the correlation (denoted by \tau) between estimates of different characteristics based on the same panel in the same or different months. This paper describes a methodology for estimating these panel correlations and presents estimated correlations for selected variables using 1980-81 and 1985-87 data with some discussion.