Thanks for the quick response, I really appreciate it. This is relevant for a project I’m currently working on (and changes the workload involved significantly) so I’m trying to make sure I understand what is happening in the data.
With that goal, I just downloaded the ASEC 1996 sample from NBER and from IPUMS-CPS, sequentially merged them, and verified the merge with age, race and sex. At this point, I compared the IPUMS variable “hseq” to the NBER “ph_seq” and they were an exact match. Comparing the IPUMS variable “pernum” to the NBER “pppos” variable, they also match (with pernum=pppos-40) for every single observation.
I am confused at why you are saying there are no equivalent variables in IPUMS. Can you share what source you are getting that information from? Maybe this only works for some years and 1996 (which I randomly picked) just happens to be one of them? If that is the case, is there any existing documentation on which years can be merged this way?
Thanks again for all the help, I’m just trying to get to the bottom of this since I will (hopefully) be using this for a project very soon.