fRDB Research Tools

fRDB Research Tools

In the continuous effort to improve our Documentation Centre, we are now distributing a series of technical research tools developed by the Fondazione staff that might be useful for other researchers as well. All these tools and the related documentation are freely downloadable from our website.

At the moment we are releasing the following research tools.

1. Infiling Dictionaries for the Italian Labour Force Surveys

Istat, the Italian National Statistical Office, produces the official Labour Force Surveys which contains information on various labour market issues for 75 thousands Italian families and about 200 thousands individuals. Particularly, Istat has made available two kinds of microdata:

• The cross-sectional data, which contain all the currently available sweeps of the Italian Labour Force Surveys, starting in April 1993;
• The longitudinal data, recently published, which allow to follow a sub-sample of individuals over time and, thus, to reconstruct labour market flows.

The data provided by Istat are in ascii format and need to be transformed into a usable format. The Fondazione has developed a complete set of dictionaries that can be used to import the original ascii files into Stata, for both the cross-sectional and longitudinal data. The dictionaries automatically name variables that are repeated throughout several sweeps with identical names, so that they can be easily recognised in each file. As far as possible, the variable names of the cross-sectional and longitudinal data are made comparable.
To access the dictionaries, please follow this link.

2. Personal Identification Number for the panel dimension of Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth

Since the late 70s the Bank of Italy collects and distributes microdata on Italian families: the Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW). You can freely download the data from Historical (1977-2004) and Annual (1989-2004) archives directly from Bank of Italy web site at this link.
Starting in 1989 a panel component has been added to the survey: a subsample of households is interviewed repeatedly over the years. For various applications it is useful to construct a personal identification number that is constant across all sweeps (from 1989 to 2004) for each individual. Such an identification number is not provided in the original data, where one can only find a family number (NQUEST), a progressive number of family members (NORD) and the progressive number of the same family member in the previous sweep of the survey (NORDP).
Using this information, we have developed a simple procedure to create a fixed personal id number for all individuals in the 8 sweeps of data (1989, 1991, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004).