Job Mobility and Tenure Supplements

CPS
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Hi,

I just wanted to ask if the Job Tenure and Occupational Mobility supplements for the CPS from the years 1978 and 1981 are expected to be updated on IPUMS any time.

The reason I’m asking is because the raw .dat files that NBER provides here appear to lack a consistent data dictionary. The documentation is incorrect - it suggests that the supplement variables should be located in positions 279-297, and yet these positions are blank for all observations in the raw files.

Any guidance or experience you have working with these earlier tenure supplements (prior to 1983) would be deeply appreciated! Also, if there are any alternative sources of data for this, it would be great to know. I’m located outside the US and am unable to access the Census Bureau’s DataFerret feed.

Thanks in advance, and more generally, a huge thank you to IPUMS for the invaluable service it provides in hosting and sharing the data!

1 Like
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Unfortunately, IPUMS also does not have sufficient documentation to process these early job tenure supplement files. As you mention, there is significant documentation missing for the data files for both of these years. This includes missing pages from the codebook (1978) and apparent mismatches between the codebook and the data files (1981). In 1981 specifically, we are unable to uniquely identify persons. You can find more details about issues with identifying unique household and person records in the CPS in Flood, S., Rodgers, R., Pacas, J., Kristiansen, D., & Klaas, B. (2022). Due to these significant concerns regarding the reliability of the data, we do not currently plan to make them available via IPUMS CPS.