Info on non-primary occupation in CPS?

Is there any variable in IPUMS that gives the occupation for non-primary jobs of multiple jobholders? If not, is this available anywhere?

There is a variable in the CPS questionnaire that elicits information about an individual’s second job. It is called “PEIO2OCD” in the basic monthly surveys. It isn’t asked in the ASEC surveys. Unfortunately, IPUMS CPS currently only has information about current (OCC) and past (OCCLY) jobs and occupations, but nothing about contemporaneous secondary job/occupation.

This being the case, you can access the “PEIO2OCD” variable from NBER and merge this data onto IPUMS CPS data. You can perform this merge by using the variables HRHHID, HRHHID2, HUHHNUM, HRSAMPLE, HRSERSUF, and LINENO as linking keys while merging datasets. This method is possible because, with the exception of LINENO (which is called PULINENO in NBER files), these variables have the same names in IPUMS CPS as in the raw CPS files available via NBER.

After the merge is complete, you can confirm everything worked properly by checking that the sex, age, and race of respondents match between the datasets. More information on merging NBER CPS data with IPUMS CPS data ca be found in this blog post.

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Hi! I found your answer very helpful. You mentioned in Jan 2018 that PEIO2OCD was available from NBER but not yet available from IPUMS. Since that answer was a year ago, I wonder if it is possible to access PEIO2OCD via IPUMS in the near future? Thank you!

This variable is not yet available. The IPUMS CPS Team is in the process of making all CPS source variables available via the IPUMS CPS website. This process, however, takes quite a bit of time and is still ongoing. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately forecast when the full integration of CPS variables will be complete. Until that time, you can use the detail about linking IPUMS data with NBER data available above.