Consumer Expenditure Survey on Stata

[Alessandro Franconi]

Hi all, does anyone have any Stata code for importing and working with the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) that I could use? The CEX is a survey that collects data on expenditures, income, and demographics in the United States.

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

This isn’t my area but I sometimes work with surveys. The best forest strip is to go to whoever produces the survey to seek out documentation about its creation and how to use it. Very often there will be example code to import the data, though it may only be instructions for one or a small number of statistical packages. How you work with it specifically depends very much on how the survey is designed, that is whether it is a complex sampling design or something else.

[William Lisowski]

If the Consumer Expenditure Survey whose data you seek is the one described at

https://www.bls.gov/cex/home.htm

then following the link to "public use microdata files" will give you a wealth of information, including links to a "Getting Started Guide", to Documentation, and to Data Files, which are available in several formast, including Stata .dta files (collected within ZIP archives).

I've not worked with the Consumer Expenditure Survey, so I have no code to share. But in general I would be reluctant to share code I have written for other surveys, because my code is written for me, and lacks the documentation necessary for others to be able to use it effectively without my assistance, which is not always available. And conversely, were I to prepare and document generally useful code, I would be inclined to share it in such a way that it would be indexed and findable by Stata's search command. But search cex and search consumer and search expenditure do not reveal anything related to the Consumer Expenditure Survey microdata.

[Alessandro Franconi]

Thanks to both!