NBER's CPS May Extracts
NBER's CPS May Extracts -- 1969-1987
This page contains the NBER collection of Current Population Survey (CPS) May Extracts. The CPS May Files are a (relatively) uniform subset of 200 variables from the Current Population Survey May Supplement files. From 1969-1978, usual weekly hours and earnings and union coverage were asked only in May. From 1979 on, these questions were asked during the respondent's outgoing rotations, the fourth and eighth month that a household is interviewed. See the Merged Outgoing Rotation Groups for 1979- extract information.
Matching information and Stata .do files from NBER Working Paper t0247 by B. Madrian and L. J. Lefgren are available for March-to-March matches and can be modified for use in other matches. Technical Paper 63 contains more information about Design and Methodology.
The data files are available as Stata *.dta files, uncompressed, UNIX-compressed, or pkzipped. Conversion software such as Stat/Transfer can be used to convert the Stata files to other formats. Stata users can use 'copy "/data/cps_may.html/cpsmay69.dta" cpsmay69.dta' to copy the files to their current directory.
File size: Uncompressed files are 25-30 Mb; .Z files are 5-6 Mb; and .zip files are 4-5 Mb.
Both ".Z" and ".zip" files can be uncompressed with winzip. In addition, ".Z" files can be uncompressed using the UNIX uncompress command and ".zip" files can be unzipped with uncompression software. To check ability to uncompress these files, download the small files compress.Z or compress.zip. These files give an example of how to read .Z and .zip ASCII files into SAS for UNIX without decompressing the files.
To download files in Internet Explorer, right click on them and select "Save Target As...". If the pdf documents appear to be all blank pages, get the latest Acrobat Reader at www.abobe.com.
Internal users can obtain the data from a UNIX shell at /homes/data/cps-may or on an NBER PC via Network Neighborhood --> NBER --> home --> data --> cps-may
CPS May Extract Documentation
The CPS May Extract Documentation is cpsmay.txt. The documentation for the data that the extract was created from is available below.Variable Labels for x1-x200
SAS | SPSS | Stata |
State Crosswalk
Thanks to Mireille Jacobson for providing a crosswalk for the different state codes.
statid.txt has a correspondence between the x7 from 1977 on and x9. It is an empirical tab taken from the 1977 data (which has both state id variables).
1969-1972 | 1973-1976 | 1977-1987 | statid.txt |
DATA
Contact data@nber.org with questions, comments, or suggestions.
Last Update: March 12, 2003 | Created by Jean Roth December 10, 2000 |