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Background The Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) covers permanent civilian Federal employees hired before 1984, providing them retirement and survivor benefits. Employees hired afterwards, as well as those who availed [...]

The potential of the Social Security Administration's Master Beneficiary Record file for supporting the study of migration among the elderly is explored. The file's characteristics are described, and attention is called to its unique perspective on migration. Some findings, from a sample study, are presented on the extent and correlates of elderly migration for the one-year period ending June 1985. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A sample of pairs of twins who were born in the United States in 1919 and survived to adulthood is identified through an innovative and large-scale application of the methodology of probabilistic linkage. The social security program began in the United States in November 1936, and the file of applicants for a social security number - which was used in this study - is the closest thing in the United States to a population register. The study results are very satisfactory, and demonstrate the superiority of probabilistic linkage to exact linkage. We estimate that about 33,000 twin pairs were born in the United States in 1919 and about 19,000 survived to age 17. Since the social security number was not then, at the inception of the program, the universal identifier that it is today, the number of enumerated twin pairs is somewhat less. Nonetheless, over 16,000 twin pairs can be identified by the method of probabilistic linkage. By comparison, only about half as many can be identified by straightforward exact linkage.