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99.99 = N.I.U. (Not in Universe).
99.97 = Top Code (Wages of $99.99 an hour or more).

See User Note for these codes

Description

HOURWAGE reports how much the respondent earned per hour in the current job, for those workers paid an hourly wage (and coded as "2" in PAIDHOUR). Amounts are expressed as they were reported to the interviewer; users must adjust for inflation using Consumer Price Index adjustment factors. Researchers should use the EARNWT weight with this variable.

Users should note that HOURWAGE originally had two implied decimal places, but was revised so that the command files provided by IPUMS divide HOURWAGE by 100.

HOURWAGE is one of the Outgoing Rotation/Earner Study questions.

Comparability

Apart from the effects of inflation, this variable is comparable over time.

Information about hourly wage rates was collected in the ASEC CPS beginning in 1982, as part of a series of questions about usual weekly and hourly earnings. The Census Bureau reports that the results in the CPS public use files for this data series included errors for years prior to 1990, so only data from 1990 forward are part of IPUMS-CPS.

According to Technical Paper 66, issued jointly by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, individuals eligible for the earner study are civilians age 15 and older in rotation groups 4 or 8 who are not self-employed.  In any given month, approximately 1/4 of the CPS sample is in the earner study and each household should appear in the earner study exactly twice. Based on documentation from Unicon and NBER, and after an inspection of the original CPS data, we recommend that users impose the CPS eligibility restrictions in any analyses of earner study variables.

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