Estimating years of education using the current population survey after 2014

Joni Hersch, Fernando Mendoza Lopez and Jennifer Bennett Shinall

Economics Letters, 2020, vol. 189, issue C

Abstract: In 2015, the Current Population Survey (CPS) eliminated three questions related to educational attainment. These now-eliminated questions continue to be used by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to calculate their years of education variable in their Merged Outgoing Rotation Groups (MORG) extracts. We demonstrate that the NBER imputation method after 2014 results in missing values for imputed education for 27.5% of the observations and average years of education of about 1.1 fewer years. We provide coding that can be used with the current CPS questions to allow comparison of years of education over time.

Keywords: Current population survey; Education; Missing data; Coding errors; Merged outgoing rotation groups; NBER (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C18 C8 C81 I2 J00 J01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:189:y:2020:i:c:s0165176520300665

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109058

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