Pre-1976 monthly CPS data

CPS
1

Hello,
I was wondering if it’s possible to get monthly cps data pre-1976. I see the ASEC goes back to 1962, but when I download that data the month variable only takes a value of “March”, so I am unable to create monthly data from it.

Thanks for your help,
David

2

IPUMS does not have any pre-1976 basic monthly CPS files. To the best of our knowledge, a complete series of basic monthly microdata files pre-1976 does not exist. A few of the (non-March) pre-1976 supplement microdata files do exist (and these include the basic monthly data). Some of these supplements are available through ICPSR.

3

Can you point to any technical papers or documentation on this? I assume that IPUMS researchers have written papers on what is available and the difficulty of building earlier series.

4

To the best knowledge of myself and the IPUMS CPS team, there is no such paper. It’s not so much that building earlier series is difficult, but that the pre-1976 basic monthly sample microdata simply do not exist anymore. There are a handful of pre-1976 non-ASEC samples that include supplement data, which exist but have not yet been harmonized by IPUMS. If there are specific samples that you are interested in, please contact ipums@umn.edu and we may be able to assist you in locating the raw data, if it exists.