Empty income variables in Stata from 2000 5% sample

USA
1

Hi Everybody,

I’m new to IPUMS, I would like to use the data to calculate county-level inequality coefficients.

I have dowloaded the following data:

2000 5%5.0%

H YEAR Census year H DATANUM Data set number P PERNUM Person number in sample unit P INCTOT Total personal income P FTOTINC Total family income

However, when I run the do file (which opens the dat file I download) in Stata I don’t have any values in the income variables:

sum inctot

Variable | Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max

-------------±-------------------------------------------------------

inctot | 0

Also, if I open the .dat file with a text editor I don’t have data for income, just: 200001000699999990007500 for each line (year, datum, serial, hhwt) Am I doing something wrong? There is no income data available in the selected sample? Thank you very much, appreciated. Kind regards, Daniel

2

I was unable to replicate your issue. I downloaded all five of your extracts from today, read them into STATA, and observed that all variables were properly populated in each dataset. Based on the large size of your first two extracts, I would recommend downloading the zipped data extract file again and ensuring the download fully completes before unzipping it. If you are still seeing empty income variables in STATA, please email ipums@umn.edu with the STATA do-file you are using to read-in the data.

Hope this helps.

3

Thank you, it was my error, I used the same Stata .do file for all extracts, it is indeed working.