Hi all, I am working with the CPS monthly data (2018-2021) downloaded from IPUMS website. I am trying to make it panel in Stata using the xtset command. However, I am confused as to how should I go about it? I know that cpsidp is a variable that uniquely identifies the individuals but we also know that cps is a rotating panel so we can not just use “xtset cpsidp year /month” as it will have repeated values within time. Let me know how it works. Thank you!
You can use CPSIDP as your panel variable as it does not contain repeated values within a single time period. Individuals appear only once within a given monthly sample and eight times total across the 16-month panel.