Employment Research Data Center

Welcome to the Analysis of UI Recipients' Unemployment Spells Public Use Data CD. This document provides basic information about the files on this CD. Clicking on underlined blue text in the sections below will link you to that document.

Acrobat Reader is required for many documents on this CD. If you do not have Acrobat Reader on your system, you may install it from this CD following the instructions in the "Installing Acrobat Reader" section below.

A listing of the files contained on the CD can be found in the CDcontents document. A brief overview of the data can be found in the data summary.

The REPORTS subdirectory contains the final report and the data documentation, both written by Mathematica Policy Research.

The DATA subdirectory contains the data, contents, and variable means for the UIspells data set. This data set is provided in ASCII format (.dat files). Please note that the variable named ltjan80 has a zero value for all observations. This variable should indicate which individuals were laid off before January 1980. At this time, we are not able to determine why the variable was recorded as zero for all records.

In addition to the ASCII format of the data described above, the Upjohn Institute has formatted the data into Stata version 6.0 and SAS export/transport files, which can be found in the “Upjohn Institute Created Files” folder within the DATA subdirectory. This folder also contains the contents and variable means.

For those using the SAS export/transport files, the file Import.sas in the "Upjohn Institute Created Files" folder contains a sample program to import the SAS export/transport file into the user’s SAS system. The program UIspells.sas, a sample SAS program to read the UIspells ASCII file, can also be found in this folder. This program can be used as a guide for reading the ASCII file into programs other than SAS and can be opened in any word processing software.

The IMAGES subdirectory contains the header image used in this file. This directory does not contain any information about the program itself.

Installing Acrobat Reader

Acrobat Reader is required to read many of the documents on this CD. To install Acrobat Reader 5.0 with Search:

	Open the INSTALL folder in Windows Explorer
	Double-click on the rp500enu.exe application
	Follow the directions given on the screen