Rotating Panel Labor Force Surveys

This website provides access to the data used in Donovan, Lu, and Schoellman (2023). It is maintained by the three authors, Kevin Donovan, Will Lu, and Todd Schoellman. If you have any suggestions, comments, or questions about the data, or are aware of any data we are missing, please email us at lfs.dataportal@gmail.com.

Dataset basics:
The data provided here are derived by harmonizing the individual-level responses in rotating panel labor force surveys conducted by governments around the world. These surveys track individuals for (at least) two consecutive quarters, allowing us to construct flows between employment statuses. Our current database includes ~80 million observations from 49 countries with real GDP per capita ranging from 3,000 - 70,000.

Micro data access:
Unfortunately we are unable to provide the underlying micro data due to agreements with various statistical agencies. If you are interested in accessing the micro data, see the Micro Data Availability page for more details. Most can be found online with a bit of searching, though the monetary and time costs vary by country. The underlying code to clean and harmonize the data is available on the Codes and Documentation page.

Access to data not available on this page:
Any requests for additional disaggregation can be made through the Requests page. We are happy to provide them assuming we (1) have the data and (2) are allowed to under agreed-upon sharing rules. Requests that violate #2 will generally be narrow data cuts that decrease cell size to an unacceptably small level.

The views expressed here are not the official views of the Central Bank of Chile, its Board members, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Federal Reserve System, or any data provider. We thank STEG and the Yale Economic Growth Center for their support developing this dataset. None of these institutions are responsible for any errors that remain.