labor earnings categories

CPS
1

I am working with some data in Larrimore et al. (2008, JESM) to address topcoding of the income data in the CPS. Based on discussions with the authors they use 4 components of labor earnings starting in 1988: primary earnings from any source (farm, wages, or self-employment) secondary wage earnings, secondary self-employment earnings, and secondary farm earnings. It would appear that these series have already been combined in the IPUMS data (INCFARM INCWAGE INCBUS). IS there any way to back out the original series? Apparently the 4 category version of the data are available from the NBER and Census CPS sites. I have already done an immense amount of work on this project using the IPUMS data so would prefer not to have to switch things around.

THanks for your help.

Best regards,

Daniel Cooper

2

Unfortunately, I do not know of a reliable way to back out the component values from the total values. However, because the NBER files and IPUMS-CPS files have the same sort order, you can perform a one-to-one merge on the files, so you can have access to those variables IPUMS-CPS does not offer, while still using primarily IPUMS-CPS data.

I hope this helps.