Sources and Applications for Open Economic Data

Editor's Notes

• #3: Microdata captures information at the actual unit of analysis. Example: For a survey, microdota would be the results of each individual participants answers. Aggregate data summarizes microdata. Information may be aggregated by geography, marital status, income level and much more. Example: Census data for Tallahassee revealing total population, age cohorts and unemployment rate would be aggregate data.
• #5: Look @ economies at a glance for Florida as well as Tallahassee Go to bls.gov Select “state products” (near bottom of page) Click Florida (or any state), Select Economy at a Glance Now, look @ what other metro areas have the same data (Tallahassee, Orlando, Tampa ect)
• #6: Make a point to go through each category and talk about all of the different data sets by subject. Make a note of the different data sources that BLS uses. We’re going to be looking at unemployment. Look @ “Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS)” using “One-screen data search” to get historical data. Note that you can change the output years to go further back. If you select “tables” instead of the one screen search, you can take a quick look at current unemployment rates in premade tables.
• #8: Go through all of the public use data archive Go through sources of data and explain how it is a cooperation Click on “Occupational Wages Around the World” Look at authors, technical documentation and file formats Extract STATA files or ASCII files
• #11: Go to https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/ then click “categories” Point out different categories and find “population, employment and labor markets” and click on it Notice how it narrows down the existing categories to that type of data? Note that categories overlap. Select Current Population Survey: select unemployment rate, select unemployment rate 20 years and over (seasonally adjusted) Now, add employment rate from same survey for Black or African Americans View graph and then Export graph into Excel.
• #13: 4-8-4 scheme: Households from all 50 states and the District of Columbia are in the survey for 4 consecutive months, out for 8, and then return for another 4 months before leaving the sample permanently. This design ensures a high degree of continuity from one month to the next (as well as over the year). The 4-8-4 sampling scheme has the added benefit of allowing the constant replenishment of the sample without excessive burden to respondents. This gives the survey panel data or cross sectional time series element
• #14: Take a while to set up an account so I can show you some of the variables and how the interface looks. You can create an account for free. When you select variables and are ready for extraction, you’ll have to authenticate. NOTE: During class, I was linking to IPUMS CPS, not IPUMS USA, which is why we couldn’t determine whether we wanted to get sample microdata from the ACS or CPS. It was defaulting to only CPS. Please see update link and select some sample variables to extract.
• #16: Access iPoll from the Libraries Homepage: www.lib.fsu.edu Click “find a database” then type in roper or ipoll to bring up the database Go to iPoll – note that you’re searching for questions, not surveys Go to “topic” and select “Economic” Lets see what we have, note the sources from each question, this will tell you where to look for your next question You can create “folders” of questions
• #17: Mention that FSU is a member institution Go to ICPSR, show how you can browse by subject, topic series or other. Access ICPSR through the Libraries homepage like you did with iPoll find something under Economic Behavior and Attitude and show data formats as well as the codebook Codebooks include the survey itself, variable translations, variable weights and other things NOTE: If you ever need to gain access to restricted data from ICPSR, you can contact one of your professors who can arrange data delivery with ICPSR and the Libraries.