Is it possible to link ASEC with CPS monthly files on NBER? I have read papers that describe how to link the ASEC to the CPS basic monthly, but these papers assume that the CPSID is available, which seems to only be true if you are downloading directly from the IPUMS CPS website. From what I can tell, the CPS basic monthly data on NBER’s website does not have a CPSID variable, so I assume this was constructed later. There are responses to questions that are not available on the general IPUMS CPS site that can only be found in the complete NBER microdata, which is why I need to link the ASEC with this specifically.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Yes, it is possible to merge ASEC data between IPUMS CPS to IPUMS NBER. The easiest way to perform this merge is to use a sequential merge. This type of merge will match the first observation from one dataset to the first observation from another dataset. Since IPUMS and NBER datasets share the same sort order for ASEC samples, a sequential merge should successfully add any available variable in NBER to an existing IPUMS CPS data extract. After the merge is completed, we suggest to confirm everything worked properly by checking that the SEX, AGE, and RACE of respondents match between datasets. Some additional detail is available in this blog post.
Thank you for the response. To clarify, I do not want to merge the ASEC from IPUMS with the ASEC from NBER. I want to merge the March Basic Monthly file from NBER with the ASEC from IPUMS. Is this possible?
Ah, okay. Sorry for misunderstanding your question. The IPUMS created variable MARBASECIDP is a unique identifier that links ASEC person records to their corresponding records in the March basic file. So, I’d first merge the ASEC file to the corresponding March basic file using IPUMS data. Then, I’d merge this merged ASEC-March IPUMS file with the NBER March basic file using the method explained in this blog post. You’ll want to merge using the variables HRHHID, HRHHID2, HUHHNUM, HRSAMPLE, HRSERSUF, and LINENO as linking keys. Note that you’ll need to rename the LINENO variable (which is called PULINENO in NBER files). I hope this helps. If you have any questions, feel free to email ipums@umn.edu directly.