Clarify SIPP is public-use; only IRS-PUF is access-restricted#809
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Clarify SIPP is public-use; only IRS-PUF is access-restricted#809
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John Sabelhaus corrected a licensing overclaim in the 2026-04-21 meeting: the SIPP vintage we consume (Census public-use SIPP) has no per-user license, data-use agreement, or registration requirement. Of the six upstream sources the pipeline ingests (CPS, ACS, SCF, ORG, SIPP, IRS-PUF), only IRS-PUF has a genuine access restriction. The HuggingFace mirror of pu2023.csv is a caching convenience, not an access-restriction workaround. This matters for TRACE / reproducibility writeups: overstating which inputs are restricted distorts the institutional-certification story. Fixes #808. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Summary
Why
At the 2026-04-21 meeting with Lars Vilhuber (AEA Data Editor), John Sabelhaus, and the TRACE team, John (who co-built the Sabelhaus subsynthetic beta) corrected a claim Max had been making: that SIPP requires individual user licensing. The actual SIPP vintage we use is Census public-use SIPP; the subsynthetic beta is separate. Both are effectively unrestricted. Overstating restrictions matters because it distorts which pipeline inputs genuinely warrant institutional-certification framing under TRACE.
No pipeline or ingest code changes; this is purely a docs guardrail to prevent regressions in external-communication writeups.
Test plan
Fixes #808.
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