In the SIPP 2014 Wave 1 file, there were some known issues aggregating variables to form the weekly employment status recode variables (RWKESR1-RWKESR5).  First, for approximately 600 weeks (or about 200 person-month records), the recode variable did not indicate a person was on layoff even though the components of the employment status recode variables indicated a layoff. In other words, RWKESR(1-5) was assigned a value of 2 instead of 3.  Second, for approximately 30 weeks (or about 20 person-month records), the recode variable indicated a person looked for work even though the components of the employment status recode variables did not indicate looking for work, or vice versa.  In other words, RWKESR(1-5) was assigned a value of 4 instead of 5, or vice versa.  Both of these issues with RWKESR(1-5) imply issues with the monthly employment status recode variable (RMESR).  The second issue also implies issues with the number of weeks looking for work recode variable (RMWKLKG).  These issues were corrected for Wave 2.  Recognizing that it is difficult to adjust these recode variables to their proper value, the SAS program “RWKESR_ADJUST.sas” is designed to create off-the-shelf, updated employment status recode variables. The program requires the input dataset “XWK.sas7bdat”, which indicates which week numbers fall into each month in a year.

Please refer to the comments in the file RWKESR_ADJUST.sas for more details.