Why can't I find, in the monthly data, the question that asks whether the individual would work if offered?

CPS
1

In the CPS survey, there is the following question:

PEDWAVL 2 LAST WEEK, COULD YOU HAVE STARTED 359 - 360
 A JOB IF ONE HAD BEEN OFFERED?



 



I can't find this in the IPUMS variable search. Am I missing something?
2

Unfortunately, you are not missing anything. This variable is currently not available via IPUMS CPS. Sorry for any inconvenience. It is now on the list of variables to add in the future, but I’m not able to estimate when it will be available.

You can merge CPS variables available via NBER with IPUMS CPS files. Assuming you currently have your IPUMS-CPS extract loaded into Stata and have saved the corresponding raw NBER file in Stata format as something like “cpsYEAR_ASEC.dta”, you can perform a sequential merge with the following command: merge 1:1 n using cpsYEAR_ASEC.dta. The “n” in the command is an internal Stata variable that represents the order of records, so when merging on n you are merging record 1 from the master file with line one from the using file.

I hope this helps.