Hello,
INCEARN is coded as unknown as soon as BR1980A_INCOTHER (income from secondary occupations) is coded as zero, even when BR1980A_GROSSINC (income from main occupation) is known and different from zero.
Best,
Geoffrey
Congratulations–you have discovered an error in IPUMS International! Cases where people report a valid value for BR1980A_GROSSINC but a zero value for BR1980A_INCOTHER should have valid values for INCEARN instead of unknown for the 1980 Brazil data. We are working on implementing a fix for this; until then, you can use the source variables you mention in your original post to recode cases affected by this error. As a thank you, we would love to send you an IPUMS mug. Please email ipums@umn.edu with a mailing address where we can ship this token of our appreciation.