deferred earnings from jobs covered by FICA tax; summed across all employers in the DER to give a person-level total for each year. While the variable exists on the Gold Standard for the years 1978-1986, it is always missing in this time period. The year 1987 is the first year with positive deferred wages. On the synthetic and completed gold standard files, we only keep 1990-2006 because so few people had deferred wages between 1987 and 1989 that we could not reliably synthesize these variables.