No top code value of '99997' in PROPTAX in ASEC 2013-2019. Just NAs

CPS
1

I’m using the ipumsr package to import CPS ASEC data. I requested a bunch of household variables and all annual samples from 2013 to 2019.

# 'cps_00001.dat.gz' is in the same directory
cps1319 = ipumsr::read_ipums_micro('./cps_00001.xml')

The DDI says that all cases of the variable PROPTAX being missing are coded as ‘99997’. After importing the data above, there are no cases in which PROPTAX in the loaded tibble equals ‘99997’. I do, however, see a lot of NAs under PROPTAX.

Are there even supposed to be NAs?

If it helps, I don’t get this issue when importing ACS data from IPUMS USA. I use the same function as above with the ‘usa_00001.xml’ DDI and its corresponding *.dat.gz file. The resultant tibble contains no NAs in the ACS property tax variable, PROPTX99 (which isn’t a continuous variable, but gives ranges). No NAs in HHINCOME either. All top codes are there, as expected, for variables which are supposed to have top codes instead of NAs.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Edit: Also, I’m using ipumsr 0.4.0 on Ubuntu 18.04.2. All other R packages are up-to-date.

2

The reason for the NAs is that the PROPTAX variable is only available up through the 2015 ASEC sample. So, when you include ASEC samples beyond 2015 in your dataset the value for PROPTAX is missing in the sense that the data is not available in that sample. Not “missing” in the sense of item non-response. You should see that all of the NAs correspond to ASEC samples from 2016 onward.

3

Oh I see. I didn’t pay close attention to the years available. Thank you.