ELSA's Data

Bronwyn Hall's datasets, including patents-R&D data; patents data at the individual firm level; header information for all the firms in the 1991 manufacturing sector master file; firms that exited from the 1991 manufacturing sector master file (and reasons for exit); data for productivity estimation; data for market value estimation. See also the NBER patents Citations Data site.

1990 Census: raw STF3C data, with documentation. This dataset provides tabulations of all variables for any geographic level.

David Card/Ken Chay's Extracts of the 1980 and 1990 Census 5% Sample. Data are available in Unix SAS datasets, with complete documentation. The extracts are for females and males by state, with information aggregated in nine geographic divisions for each census.

David Card's collection of 1970 Census: raw (state) files and extracts. Includes SAS programs for easy data extraction; a useful collections of SAS datasets; raw STF4C files; explanation of "5 percent" vs. "15 percent" sample.

David Card's collection of basic monthly Current Population Survey data ("bigcps") for all months from 1976 through 2000. These are Unix-compressed ascii files, and a sample extraction program for SAS is available. Codebooks are also available.

David Card's collection of Current Population Survey March demographic files from 1968 through 2000. These are unix-compressed raw data files, with annotated SAS extraction programs and documentation on errors or potential problems in the data for each year. The SAS programs contain "put" statements that permit the user to output stata or other data formats. This collection includes the " displaced worker surveys" (January, and more recently, February, CPS files).

David Card's collection of Current Population Survey October files from 1968 through 1995. The data files are available as unix-compressed raw ascii files or as SAS files.

David Card's collection of Current Population Survey monthly files from 1989 through 1997. These are unix-compressed ascii files. Most of the data are organized as a single file for each month of data.

David Card's collection of BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics, 1976-2000. This is BLS's best estimates of monthly employment and unemployment for each local entity (state, county, city, "place"). The files are Unix-gzipped, one for each year, with an ascii file of user notes (usernotes.txt) and a ascii file showing column locations (readme). This will be of use to anyone who is hoping to use high frequency labor force data for small areas (such as cities or counties)

Lorna Greening's Integrated Consumer Expenditure Survey data files, for 1980-1994. Data are available in either ascii or Unix SAS formats. Variables are labeled consistently across all fourteen years.

SAS datasets (a few ascii) for 1993-1998 for the Consumer Expenditure Survey, with documentation, compiled by Sally Woodhouse. Variable definitions across time are not necessarily consistent. In addition, we have the raw (ascii, unix-compressed) interview datafiles for 1980 and 1984-1996 for the Consumer Expenditure Survey collected from the BLS cd roms by Elaine Watt, with documentation and value-added notes and programs. Also available are raw files for the 1994 and 1995 Consumer Expenditure Survey that were copied directly from the BLS cd roms (for 1995, from the revised BLS cd rom, and include the official BLS documentation). (For EML users, these are also online at /archive.)

Re-released files for 1980 and 1981 Consumer Expenditure Survey. BLS has released an updated, corrected set of files as of 12/99. The tables that are constructed from combined expenditure diaries and annual interviews for CES 1984-95 are also available, as well as all official BLS documentation.

Files (spreadsheet format corresponding to printed tables; more recent abstracts include PDFs as well as Lotus and Excel formats) for the Statistical Abstracts of the U.S. for 1993-2000. (For EML users, these are also online at /archive.)

Other data sources in the Econometrics Laboratory.

ABOUT DOWNLOADING DATA:

From time to time, we receive inquiries about downloading an entire filesystem recursively, preserving the structure of the directories and subdirectories. If you are a PC Windows 95/NT user, you can use the Windows FTP client from ftp.ipswitch.com or another comparable client to download entire directories in this fashion.

If you are on a Unix system, one way to ftp recursively from a unix ftp client program is to use the alternative ftp program called "ncftp". Either use the ncftp internal command "get -R" on a directory or use a shell command line with an ftp URL

Source code for ncftp is available freely from http://www.ncftp.com .

elsa.berkeley.edu also supports dynamic tar'ing of directories; i.e. in an ftp session with elsa, if the current remote directory contains a subdirectory named "mydir" then the ftp command "get mydir.tar.Z" will cause elsa to create, on the fly, a compressed tar file of "mydir", keeping its structure intact.