Economics 475:
Econometrics
Finding Data
Perhaps the single thing that slows students down
the most
in 475 is finding data used in their final project.
The purpose of this handout is to suggest a
few places to search for easy to use data.
The US Census bureau as a method for
disseminating
many large cross sectional data sets.
These data include the American Community Survey, the American
Housing
Survey, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, Consumer
Expenditure
Survey, the Current Population Survey, Decennial Census of Population
and
Housing, Decennial Public Use Microdata Samples (the Census),
Mortality,
National Ambulator Medical Care Survey, National Survey of Fishing,
Hunting,
and Wildlife Associations, Social Security Administration, Survey of
Income and
Program Participation, and the Survey of Program Dynamics.
Each of these surveys are large-scale,
important surveys in their own right (of ten containing thousands of
observations of hundreds of variables).
The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social
Research (http://www.icpsr.org) is a
service
provided through Western’s computer network that supplies a huge
range of mostly
cross-sectional data sets. Included in
this data set are a large number of responses to telephone
questionnaires
sponsored by news organizations, famous surveys used by economists
(like the
Panel Study of Income Dynamics), and surveys used by other fields such
as
political science and sociology (one interesting sociology survey is
the
General Social Survey). The easiest way
to navigate through this web site is to have some type of topic in mind
and
then searching for data that might be acceptable. If
you do nothing else with my data sources,
open this up and search for a while. If
more Western students use ICPSR it becomes easier to justify its large
expense
to the administration.
Perhaps the most enjoyable way of answering a question is to
create your own questionnaire and give it to fellow students and/or
members of
the community. If this is something you
hope to pursue, be sure to have your survey proofread before
administering it. We can arrange for you
to survey some introduction
to economics courses to get data.
6. 2010
Undergraduate Exit Data: This data
set observes 1,707 respondents to the 2010 undergraduate exit survey at
Western
Washington University. This survey is detailed here.
7. 9th/10th
Grade Data This data observes one
complete year of Washington 9th graders.
These students took the ITBS tests in 9th grade and then were
followed
into the 10th grade when they took the WASL. Also included are
demographic and questions about the student's high school activities.
60,296 observations are included.
10. Wage2
Data This data set comes from Jeffrey
Wooldridge
and includes 935 observations of men's wages, IQ, education,
experience
and a number of other important variables.
11. The Tennessee
Star Data (Tennessee Student Teacher Achievement Ratio--STAR)
project was a
large scale project during which young school aged children were
randomized into
classrooms based upon size. A
description of this can be found here.