Missing hrhhid and hrhhid2 entires?

CPS
1

I’m looking at monthly CPS data from January 1994 to December 2010. Many of the observations are missing an entry for hrhhid or hrhhid2. The documentation says that the universe for these variables is all households, so why would it be missing for some people?

Thanks,

Ross

2

Hi Ross,

I am doing something similar for 2005-2013, and I don’t have missing values of the household identifiers, but I did have to obtain the March identifiers from the NBER.

The HRHHID and HRHHID2 identifiers are only available for the non-March months (check the availability of HRHHID and HRHHID2). Did you happen to check whether the observations you have missing are from the March months?

If indeed the missing IDs are from the March files, you can download the NBER CPS March supplements, eliminate non-interview individuals (which are not shown in the IPUMS-CPS) and sequentially merge the March files of the NBER with the IPUMS files. When you sequentially merge you can also opt to keep only the ID variables from the NBER (since you can obtain the others in a nicer, harmonized format from the IPUMS)

Good luck,

Antonio

3

Hi Antonio,

You’re right; all of this missing hrhhid and hrhhid2 were in March. I’ll now use the March data from the NBER to fill in the identifiers.

I just have a quick follow-up question: What’s the appropriate way to eliminate non-interview individuals from the NBER data? Which variable identifies them?

Thanks,

Ross

4

Hi Ross,

For the basic files the variable you’re interested in would be HRINTSTA, I believe. And from that you can know which individuals are interviewed and which aren’t, and if not, why they were not interviewed (these are the types A, B, C of non-interviewed)

If you want the March supplement instead I think it would be the H_TYPEBC variable.

Best,

Antonio