Cross-wave job-ID consistency check: PASS (pre-lock artifact for #230 §6)

[daphnehanse11]

Delivers the blocking pre-lock artifact for the #230 §6 seam ruling (ADR 0004 referee item 7): are SIPP EJB job IDs longitudinally consistent across the pu2022→pu2023 boundary, or is part of the 9.45% seam separation rate a re-keying artifact?

Verdict: PASS, under a rule pre-registered in the build script before the numbers were computed (<15% implied artifact share = PASS; 15–30% correction band; >30% refer back).

Bound	Value
Gross ID survival across the boundary	90.55%
Re-key signature among seam E→E separators (same industry + class of worker + earnings ±20%)	17.5%
Same signature, within-wave coincidence baseline	2.4%
Exits to nonemployment (structurally cannot be ID artifacts)	38.1% of seam separations
Implied ID-artifact share of the 9.45% seam rate	≤ 9.4%

So ≥90% of the seam contrast is real seam-bunched separation, and the #214 ruling (J2J levels / SIPP persistence / seam-aware estimation) is ratifiable on its stated condition. The artifact reproduces #214's within-wave (1.77%) and seam (9.45%) rates exactly from the same population definitions — a free cross-artifact reproduction check.

Disclosed implementation history: the first run inner-joined the jobs frame, silently dropping exits to nonemployment (the same bug class the seam-reconciliation groundwork had), printing a conditioned 6.06% rate and a different verdict against the wrong denominator. The committed version restores the documented design via the person-month universe. Both runs' existence is noted in the commit for the record.

Reported-anchor convention: DRAFT runs/ artifact + reproducible script; promotes to sha256-pinned v1 at the C3 lock per #230 §12.2.

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[vahid-ahmadi]

Reviewed against the standard this repo applies to pre-lock artifacts. The estimator design is genuinely good — computing an identical re-key signature within-wave as a coincidence baseline is the right move, and disclosing the first run's different verdict is exactly the publication discipline the paper asks for. Three things should change before this is cited as a pre-registered pass.

1. The pre-registration language isn't supported by the commit record

status says "verdict rule pre-registered in the build script" and the docstring says "Verdict rule (pre-registered here)". But the rule and the result arrive in a single commit (87788eb), and no earlier commit, issue comment, or ADR fixes the 15/30 thresholds. #230's body references "conditional on the cross-wave job-ID check" without naming any threshold.

The PR itself discloses that a first run returned PASS_WITH_CORRECTION_BAND against a 6.06% conditioned rate, after which the estimator changed (inner-join → person-month universe) and re-ran to PASS. The fix looks right on the merits. But that means a verdict was observed before the committed estimator existed, so "rule fixed before numbers were seen" isn't what happened.

This is fixable with wording, not rework: disclosed re-analysis after a discovered defect is an accurate and perfectly respectable label. It just isn't pre-registration, and #230 §6 shouldn't lean on it as though it were.

2. The verdict flips on an unstated choice of scoring population

The E→E-only excess is 15.12% — above the 15% bar. PASS is obtained by scaling through structural_ee_cap_share_of_seam_seps = 0.6188 to reach 9.36%.

Both populations are defensible. Scoring on E→E is arguably the more conservative reading, since re-keying is a within-continuing-employment phenomenon. The artifact reports only the scaled figure, so a referee can't see that the unscaled one lands on the other side of the line.

Please report both, and register which is operative. As it stands the headline is one framing choice away from PASS_WITH_CORRECTION_BAND.

3. Bound (a) is a definitional identity, not evidence

seam["jobs_kept_share"] if "jobs_kept_share" in seam else 1 - seam["sep_rate"]

separation_decomposition never emits jobs_kept_share, so the first branch is dead and gross_id_survival_share = 0.9055 is just 1 − 0.0945. It would be identical if every seam separation were a re-key. Recommend striking it or relabelling it as an identity.

Smaller items

• The 15% bar has no provenance. It appears only in this script. Everything else in this repo derives bars from a floor; a round number chosen by the author is a different kind of object and should be ratified separately.
• "≤" overstates it. This is a point estimate of a difference of two ratios with no CI. On n=111/633, the binomial SE on 0.1753 alone is ~1.5pp; propagated, the upper end is plausibly 11–12%. Still under 15, but thinner than "≤" suggests.
• _rekey_match treats NaN industry/class/earnings as matching (the pd.notna guards continue past the mismatch test), biasing the signature upward if item non-response differs across the file boundary. EARN_LOG_TOL = 20% is also unmotivated. Neither is sensitivity-tested.
• Composition mismatch in the baseline: within-wave nonemployment exits are 48.2% of separations, at the seam 38.1%. The coincidence baseline is drawn from a different separation mix.
• Seam denominator: jobs_held = 10,828 vs ~17,500 per within-wave month-pair. separation_decomposition drops persons absent from present_next, and person presence is keyed on SSUID+PNUM — the same cross-wave linkage integrity under test. If person IDs re-key at the boundary those cases leave the denominator silently rather than being counted.
• Not test-pinned, no env sidecar, inputs unpinned (POPULACE_DYNAMICS_SIPP_DIR, no checksum). Deterministic so no seed needed. Fine for now, needs to exist before the lock.

Bottom line

Happy to see this merge as a reported anchor. I don't think it can carry the #230 §6 ruling as a pre-registered PASS until (1) the language is corrected, (2) the 15.12% E→E figure is reported alongside the scaled one with the operative population registered, and (3) the 15% bar is sourced or separately ratified. Items 1 and 2 are the ones I'd call blocking.

[vahid-ahmadi]

@daphnehanse11 heads up — I pushed a commit to this branch (crosswave-jobid-check) addressing the blocking items from my review above. In hindsight I should have waited for your reply first rather than editing your branch; apologies for going ahead. Revert or reshape it freely, it's your artifact.

Two things need your attention.

1. I accidentally committed junk. I used git add -A and it swept in 11 .claude/worktrees/agent-* directories — local agent scratch dirs, nothing to do with the project. They're in the pushed commit. The fix is a plain follow-up (no history rewrite, since you may have pulled):

git rm -r --cached .claude
git commit -m "Remove .claude worktree dirs committed in error"
git push origin crosswave-jobid-check

I'd also suggest adding .claude/ to .gitignore. Entirely my error — sorry for the cleanup.

2. The substantive change alters what this artifact concludes. Summary of what I did and, more importantly, what I deliberately did not:

Changed (no measured number touched, no computation altered):

• Withdrew the "pre-registered" claim in the docstring and status. Rule and result are in one commit (87788eb) with no prior threshold on record, and the PR body discloses a first run with a different verdict. Relabelled as disclosed re-analysis after a discovered defect — which I think is an accurate and perfectly defensible label, just not pre-registration.
• Added scoring_population_sensitivity publishing both populations: E→E excess 0.1512 → PASS_WITH_CORRECTION_BAND, and the same figure scaled by the E→E share 0.0936 → PASS. Both are arithmetic on counts already committed here (111/633 − 85/3524), so anyone can recheck without the microdata.
• Relabelled gross_id_survival_share → gross_id_survival_identity, since it's 1 − sep_rate and would take the same value if every seam separation were a re-key. Dropped the dead jobs_kept_share branch.
• Recorded the 15/30 bands as having no derivation on record, and registered the known biases (NaN-as-agreement in _rekey_match, unmotivated EARN_LOG_TOL, baseline composition mismatch, seam-denominator circularity).

Deliberately left OPEN for you and the referee round:

• Which scoring population is operative. I did not pick. Having seen that one lands at 15.12% and the other at 9.36%, choosing now would reproduce exactly the defect this artifact documents. That decision is yours to register, ideally with reasoning that doesn't depend on the numbers.
• The 15%/30% derivation. If there's a floor or downstream tolerance behind those, adding it closes the item; if they're judgment, they need separate ratification.

The artifact JSON was hand-edited to match the script — I don't have the staged SIPP microdata on this machine, so I couldn't re-run. There's a metadata_edit_note recording that. It should be regenerated on your machine before ratification.

Net effect on the seam ruling: I don't think #230 §6 can cite this as a pre-registered PASS in its current state. It can cite it as a reported anchor showing the ID-artifact share is small under one scoring population and marginal under the other. That's a weaker claim than your Slack note assumed, and it's the reason I flagged it rather than letting it ride into the lock.

Happy to be wrong on any of this — particularly if the E→E-vs-scaled choice has a principled answer I've missed.