Hi, I’m currently trying to replicate the published statistics from the BLS, using the data from the CPS monthly basic data.
While I succeeded in deriving the same number of employment and unemployment as published, using EMPSTAT and COMPWT, I am having trouble with deriving the number of employed by industry. Using IND, EMPSTAT, and COMPWT, I derived the figures by industry. While the aggregated number is the same as published one, the numbers in each industry are slightly different.
Do you have any insights for this issue? Is it a impossible to derive them from IPUMS-CPS data? If so, what prevents me from deriving them?
Public use files may differ somewhat from the data used to generate published estimates in order to protect respondent privacy. While top level estimates for major demographic categories and major labor force status will agree with published totals, estimates of small groups and/or combinations of these characteristics, or other characteristics not listed above, will differ due to the fact that steps are taken during the creation of CPS public use microdata files in order to protect confidentiality of respondents. You can find more details on comparability between microdata and published estimates in the codebooks for the relevant samples; see Attachment 2 (Overview) under the “Comparability of CPS Microdata files with Published Sources” header. For example for the January 2020 sample, this is on page 7 of the PDF.