NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Current Population Survey (CPS) Matching


The programs below are written to match consecutive March CPS surveys. They can be easily modified to match other CPS surveys where matching is possible. A list of variables for matching CPS basic and CPS March files is also available. Each recent CPS March Annual Demographic File includes a section on matching across years. The Stata .do files accompany 

Madrian, B. and L. J. Lefgren (1999).  "A Note on Longitudnally Matching Current 
         Population Survey Respondents."  NBER Working Paper T0247.
which is avaialble at http://www.nber.org/papers/t0247 and as "An Approach to Longitudinally Matching Current Population Survey (CPS) Respondents." Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, 2000, 26: 31-62.

Updates and changes.

NBER internal users can obtain the programs at /home/data/cps/match.


readme.txt Describes the files below
matchcps.do The master program. The other files are all called within this program. This program is written to match consecutive March CPS surveys, but can be easily modified to match other CPS surveys where matching is possible.
educate.do redefine the education variables in the CPS which are not consistently coded over time for the time t and time t+1 data to be used in the CPS merge.
educate2.do
married.do redefine the marital status variables in the CPS for the time t and time t+1 data to be used in the CPS merge.
married2.do
race.do recodes the race variable for the CPS merge.
multobs.do deals with the fact that some individuals do not actually have a unique identifier at a point in time in the CPS. The working paper does not have much detail on this problem. This is discussed further in readme.txt.
year.do creates a variable with the year

Please report errors or send comments and suggestions to Jean Roth, jroth@nber.org

Last Update: June 12, 2001 Created by Jean Roth May 7, 2001

  
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