Public Data

Research Center

1. Carolina Population Center (CPC) Data Portal
   1. Add Health
      The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) is a longitudinal study of a nationally representative sample of adolescents in grades 7-12 in the United States during the 1994-95 school year.
   2. Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of HSE
      The Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey is a series of nationally representative surveys designed to monitor the effects of Russian reforms on the health and economic welfare of households and individuals in the Russian Federation.
   3. Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey
      The Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey is part of an ongoing study of a cohort of Filipino women who gave birth between 1983 and 1984 in Cebu Province in The Philippines.
   4. China Health and Nutrition Survey
      The China Health and Nutrition Survey is an ongoing international collaborative project that was designed to examine the effects of the health, nutrition, and family planning policies.
   5. MEASURE Evaluation
      The MEASURE Evaluation project focuses on strengthen capacity in developing countries to gather, interpret, and use data to improve health. The project creates tools, approaches, and data for rigorous evaluations, providing evidence to address health challenges.
2. Cross-national Equivalent File, The Ohio State University
   The data are designed to allow cross-national researchers not experienced in panel data analysis to access a simplified version of these panels, while providing experienced panel data users with guidelines for formulating equivalent variables across countries.
   1. The British Household Panel Survey (BHPS)
      The wave 1 panel consists of some 5,500 households and 10,300 individuals drawn from 250 areas of Great Britain. Additional samples of 1,500 households in each of Scotland and Wales were added to the main sample in 1999, and in 2001 a sample of 2,000 households was added in Northern Ireland, making the panel suitable for UK-wide research.
   2. The Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA)
      The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey is a household-based panel study which began in 2001. It has the following key features:
      • It collects information about economic and subjective well-being, labour market dynamics and family dynamics.
      • Special questionnaire modules are included each wave.
      • The wave 1 panel consisted of 7,682 households and 19,914 individuals. In wave 11 this was topped up with an additional 2,153 households and 5,477 individuals.
      • Interviews are conducted annually with all adult members of each household.
      • The panel members are followed over time.
      • The funding has been guaranteed for sixteen waves, though the survey is designed to continue for longer than this.
      • Academic and other researchers can apply to use the General Release datasets for their research.
   3. The Korea Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS)
   4. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)
      The study began in 1968 with a nationally representative sample of over 18,000 individuals living in 5,000 families in the United States. Information on these individuals and their descendants has been collected continuously, including data covering employment, income, wealth, expenditures, health, marriage, childbearing, child development, philanthropy, education, and numerous other topics. 
      
   5. The Swiss Household Panel (SHP)
   6. The Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID)
      The Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) complements traditional survey data on labour market activity and income with an additional dimension: the changes experienced by individuals over time. At the heart of the survey’s objectives is the understanding of the economic well-being of Canadians: what economic shifts do individuals and families live through, and how does it vary with changes in their paid work, family make-up, receipt of government transfers or other factors?
      
   7. The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)
      The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) is a wide-ranging representative longitudinal study of private households, located at the German Institute for Economic Research, DIW Berlin. Every year, there were nearly 11,000 households, and about 30,000 persons sampled by the fieldwork organization TNS Infratest Sozialforschung.The data provide information on all household members, consisting of Germans living in the Old and New German States, Foreigners, and recent Immigrants to Germany. The Panel was started in 1984.Some of the many topics include household composition, occupational biographies, employment, earnings, health and satisfaction indicators.
3. The RAND Corporation
   1. Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (AHEAD)
      The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is a longitudinal household survey data set for the study of retirement and health among the elderly in the United States. It is extraordinarily rich and complex.
   2. Family Life Surveys (FLS)
      The Family Life Surveys (FLS) are a set of detailed household and community surveys of developing countries conducted by the RAND Corporation, in collaboration with research institutions in the given countries. The currently available country surveys cover Malaysia (1976-77, 1988-89), Indonesia (1993, 1997, 2000), Guatemala (1995), and Bangladesh (1996).
   3. Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS)
      In 1996, a major family and community survey entitled the Matlab Health and Socio-Economic Survey, or MHSS, was carried out in Matlab, a region of rural Bangladesh in which there is an ongoing prospective Demographic Surveillance System, under the aegis of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B). For a detailed description of the Matlab surveillance population, please refer to Menken, J. and J.F. Phillips, “Population Change in a Rural Area of Bangladesh, 1967-87,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 510:87-101, 1990.
      
   4. Malaysian Family Life Surveys (MFLS)
      The First and Second Malaysian Family Life Surveys (MFLS-1 and MFLS-2) comprise a pair of surveys with partially overlapping samples, designed by RAND and administered in Peninsular Malaysia in 1976-1977 (MFLS-1) and 1988-1989 (MFLS-2). The MFLS-1 sample consists of 1,262 households with an ever-married woman located in 52 communities that were selected to be representative of Peninsular Malaysia in 1976. MFLS-2 reinterviewed 926 of those MFLS-1 households (the “Panel” sample) and a subset of adult children from those original households (the “Children” sample). MFLS-2 also interviewed a new sample of 2,184 women age 18-49, regardless of marital status (the “New” sample), as well as a sample of 1,357 older Malaysians, age 50 and above (the “Senior” sample–the first representative sample of the older population in Peninsular Malaysia).
   5. Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS)
      The Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) is an on-going longitudinal survey in Indonesia. The sample is representative of about 83% of the Indonesian population and contains over 30,000 individuals living in 13 of the 27 provinces in the country.
   6. Guatemalan Survey of Family Health (EGSF)
      The Guatemalan Survey of Family Health, known as EGSF from its name in Spanish, was designed to examine the way in which rural Guatemalan families and individuals cope with childhood illness and pregnancy, and the role of ethnicity, poverty, social support, and health beliefs in this process. Household interviews were conducted in 4,792 households and individual interviews with 2,872 women ages 18 to 35. In each of the 60 sampled communities, we also carried out a community survey in which 3 key informants and a sample of biomedical and nonbiomedical health care providers were interviewed.
   7. Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey
      Research suggests that safe, supportive neighborhoods are important for children, teens, and adults. But what makes a neighborhood a positive place to live? We are trying to answer this question by comparing the lives of children and adults in a broad range of neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County.The first wave of the L.A.FANS was fielded between 2000 and 2001. Fieldwork for Wave 2 of L.A.FANS was conducted between 2006 and 2008. We offer Public Use Data and four versions of Restricted Data. See the comparison table to decide which version is right for you.
   8. The Health and Retirement Study
      The RAND HRS Data file is a cleaned and easy-to-use version of data from eleven waves of the Health and Retirement Study data, including five entry cohorts: the original 1992 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) cohort; the 1993 Study of Assets and Health Dynamics (AHEAD) cohort; the Children of Depression and War Baby cohorts entering in 1998; and Early Baby Boomer cohort entering in 2004. Derived variables covering a broad though not complete range of measures have been constructed.It includes RAND imputations of wealth, income, and medical expenditures. All variables have been named consistently across waves. It incorporates HRS data from 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012.
   9. RAND Indonesia Data Core
      For users outside RAND wishing to acquire any of the data files from the surveys listed below, please contact the Data Dissemination Division of BPS.
      *Only the documentation is available to the general public.
   10. CalWORKs Datasets
4.  Duke
   1. Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study
      The Dunedin Study has followed the lives of 1037 babies born between 1 April 1972 and 31 March 1973 Queen Mary Maternity Hospital, Dunedin, New Zealand, since their birth. The Study is now in its fifth decade and has produced over 1150 publications and reports, many of which have influenced or helped inform policy makers in New Zealand and overseas.
   2. E-Risk
      King’s College London hosts the MRC-funded Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study (E-Risk), a behavioural genetics studies which collected individual-level data on more than 1000 UK twin pairs at ages 5 (in 2000), 7 (in 2002) and 12 (in 2007) to investigate how genetic and environmental factors shape children’s disruptive behaviour. The SCoPiC Network provided the E-Rick Study with funding for a detailed neighbourhood survey to gather information about the social contexts (e.g., victimization, collective efficacy, social cohesion, formal and informal social control) which characterize the residential environments of E-Risk participants. This survey added an environmental-level dimension to this important study, allowing it to investigate multi-level effects and the interaction between individual characteristics (including genetic factors) and environmental experiences.
   3. Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR)
      In the baseline survey, the baseline for the STAR survey includes all members of households that were interviewed in the February/March 2004 round of the Survei Social Economi Nasional (SUSENAS) and were living, at that time, in a kabupaten (district) in Aceh or North Sumatra with a coastline vulnerable to tsunami inundation.In the follow-up survey, a total of 32,320 respondents comprise this sample. Through the extraordinary work of our field team, we determined that 30,000 individuals survived the tsunami and we have interviewed 96% of those people. Respondents have been tracked throughout Aceh and North Sumatra as well as to other provinces on the islands of Sumatra and Java.
   4. The Peterborough Adolescent Development Study (PADS),University of Cambridge
      The Peterborough Adolescent Development Study (PADS) represents the first phase (2002-2007) of an ongoing ESRC-funded longitudinal study, the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+) (2007-2012). Its main objective is to identify the key individual and environmental factors which foster or deter offending during adolescence. PADS is especially interested in understanding the causal processes which link these factors to crime, and the interaction between individual and environmental factors which leads individuals to perceive crime as an conceivable alternative for action and induces them to choose to commit acts of crime rather than other alternatives.
   5. The Sheffield Pathways Out of Crime Study (SPOOCS),University of Sheffield
      The Sheffield Pathways out of Crime Study SPOOCS) is a longitudinal desistance study of more than 100 persistent young adult offenders. Non-occasional young adult offenders were followed for four years from their early 20s, the apex of the age-crime curve.
5.  IZA
   The IDSC of IZA offers a data repository service for the labor economics. It provides an online-tool for self-determined documentation, upload and publication of research data. The data repository enables researchers to have their data, metadata and outputs preserved longitudinally and helps to provide it to the academic community for further research. 
   1. Life in Kyrgyzstan Panel Study, 2013
      The ‘Life in Kyrgyzstan’ Study is a research-based multi-topic longitudinal survey of households and individuals in Kyrgyzstan. It tracks the same 3000 households and over 8000 individuals over time in all seven Kyrgyz regions (oblasts) and the two cities of Bishkek and Osh. The survey collects information at household and individual levels on topics such household demographics, assets, expenditure, migration, employment, agricultural markets, shocks, social networks, subjective well-being, and many other topics. The survey was first conducted in the fall of 2010 and it has been repeated three times in 2011, 2012 and 2013. All members of the households in 2010 are tracked for each wave and new household members are added to the survey and tracked as well.
   2. Longitudinal Survey on Rural Urban Migration in China
      The Longitudinal Survey on Rural Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) consists of three parts: the Urban Household Survey, the Rural Household Survey and the Migrant Household Survey. 
      
   3. The Evolution of the Regulation of Labour in the USSR, the CIS and the Baltic States, 1985–2009
      We have generated new data on Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) in the successor states of the former USSR – the CIS and Baltic States – from 1985 – 2009. We adopted the OECD approach to quantifying regulations of the labor market and calculated detailed time series for each of the items used in version II of the OECD EPL Index.
      
   4. Toll Index
      The Toll Index (TI) is a new monthly indicator for the German business cycle. The TI measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across the country and has highly desirable availability properties (insignificant revisions, short publication lags) as a result of the innovative technology underlying its data collection.It is coincident with production activity due to the prevalence of just-in-time delivery. The Toll Index is an early indicator of production as measured for instance by the German Production Index, provided by the Federal Statistical Office – Germany, which is a well-known leading indicator of the Gross National Product. Which we suggest should be established more around the world.
      
   5. Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey
      The survey was aimed at getting detailed information on employment, reasons for unemployment and job search strategies, education, changes in places of residence and health of active adult population of Ukraine. The survey was held in all the regions including the Crimean Autonomous Republic.
      Besides individual information, the survey has been gathering information on welfare level of Ukrainian households, in particular on sources and amounts of cash and natural income, and the structure of expenditure and consumption of Ukrainian families.The household questionnaire contains items on the demographic structure of the household, including data on household membership and structure.
      Information on households’ consumption, including data on buying, making and consuming foodstuff in the household, as well as nonfood costs.The core of the survey is the individual questionnaire, which elicits detailed information concerning the labor market experience of Ukrainian workers.
      
   6. Wage Indicator Survey
      The WageIndicator Survey is a continuous, multilingual, multi-country web-survey, counducted across 65 countries since 2000. The web-survey generates cross sectional and longitudinal data which might provide data especially about wages, benefits, working hours, working conditions and industrial relations.
      The survey has detailed questions about earnings, benefits, working conditions, employment contracts and training, as well as questions about education, occupation, industry and household characteristics.
6. Center for the Study of African Economies (CSAE)
   1. Ethiopia Firms (AAIS)
      This is the first wave of a panel data set on a sample of firms within the Ethiopian manufacturing sector, all based in the Addis Ababa region. The first round of the survey was undertaken between September – December 1993. The questionnaire structure and types of data collected were designed to be consistent with other African manufacturing sector surveys carried out under the Regional Program on Enterprise Development (RPED) organised by the World Bank. The survey covers 220 firms that were selected on a random basis from manufacturing establishments in the Addis Ababa region, of which 30 are public enterprises. The firms constitute a panel which was intended to be broadly representative of the size distribution of firms across the major sectors of Ethiopia’s manufacturing industry. These sectors include food processing, textiles and garments, paper products and furniture, metal products and machinery.
   2. Ethiopia Households (ERHS)
      The Ethiopia Rural Household Survey is a unique panel data set covering households in a number of villages in rural Ethiopia. Data collection started in 1989, when a team visited 6 farming villages in Central and Southern Ethiopia to conduct a household survey with a focus on the crisis and recovery in the 1980s. In 1994, the survey was expanded to cover 15 villages across the country. From the sample in 1989, about 360 households were successfully traced – implying an attrition rate of less than 5 percent. From 1994, the sample was expanded to about 1470 households. Data were subsequently collected in during further rounds in 1994 (later in the year), 1995, 1997 and 1999. A sixth round of data collection is taking place in 2004, in collaboration with IFPRI. Data are currently available on the web for 1989, 1994 (two rounds) and 1995. Other rounds will become available.
      
   3. Free and Fair Elections Database
      The holding of elections has become universal but only about half of all elections have been free and fair. Electoral malpractice not only distorts the quality of representation but has implications for political, social and economic outcomes. Existing datasets either provide broad information on election quality for large panels or they provide very detailed information on electoral processes and events for a small number of elections. Our data collection effort closes this gap. We provide an assessment of elections that is closely tied to the commonly used term ‘free and fair’ and base this proxy on ten variables for a global panel
      
   4. Ghana and Tanzania Urban Household Panel Surveys
      The Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) at Oxford University in collaboration with the Ghana Statistical Office (GSO) and the Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has been conducting a labour market panel survey of urban sectors in Ghana and Tanzania since 2004. There are now three waves of this survey covering the period 2004 to 2006. No survey was conducted in 2007. It is planned to repeat the surveys during the course of 2008. The survey collects information on incomes, education and labor market experience, household characteristics and various other modules for labor force participants (ages 15 to 60) in urban areas.
   5. Ghana Firms (RPED & GMES)
      This dataset contains comprehensive data from a panel survey of firms operating within the Ghanaian manufacturing sector. It covers 12 years of data, collected in seven rounds over the period 1992 to 2003. Rounds I–III are annual surveys collected under the Regional Program on Enterprise Development (RPED) organised by the World Bank. Rounds IV-VI cover two years each. Round VII covers three years. The original sample of 200 firms, which were first surveyed in 1992, was drawn on a random basis from firms contained in the 1987 Census of Manufacturing Activities. The firms constituted a panel which was intended to be broadly representative of the size distribution of firms across the major sectors of Ghana’s manufacturing industry.
   6. Ghana Macro Data
      Ghana’s exports on a per capita basis failed to grow over the course of the twentieth century. The reasons for this outcome are examined in this paper. 
      
   7. Ghana – Microenterprise Growth and the Flypaper Effect, Randomized Experiment 2008-2010
      There is a growing debate over whether aid is more effective when simply given as unrestricted cash compared to approaches such as conditional transfers which try to restrict how recipients use any money received. The idea that “money sticks where it hits” was dubbed the “flypaper effect” by Arthur Okun.Through randomized experiment in Ghana, researchers tested two methods of aid delivery for microenterprises – in-kind grant that must be spent directly on the business, and a cash grant, which the owners can choose to spend how they like. The design follows closely the one used by de Mel et al (2008, 2012) in Sri Lanka. In Ghana, a sample of both female and male microenterprise owners who had no paid employees at the time of the baseline survey were randomly allocated into treatment and control groups. The treatment group received grants of 150 Ghanaian cedis (approximately $120 at market exchange rates at the time of the baseline). Half of the grants were provided in cash and half in kind. For the in-kind treatment, the owner was asked to choose any equipment or materials they would like for their business that added up to this amount, and then were accompanied by a research assistant who directly purchased these items. 793 microenterprises (479 female-owned and 314 male-owned) participated in the study.The baseline survey of these firms was conducted in October and November 2008. The two pre-treatment survey rounds were followed up by four additional quarterly survey waves in May 2009, August 2009, November 2009, and February 2010. Of the 793 firms which completed the first two rounds, 730 answered the final wave.
      
   8. Household Budget Survey of Rural Tanzania, 1983
      The main aims of this study were to assess the structure of rural household income in Tanzania in 1983; to discover changes since 1975 in agriculture and assets with special attention to the impact of the coffee boom; to assess access to government services and health, education, water, wood and sewage.
   9. Integrated Rural Survey of Kenya, 1982
      The main aims of this study were to assess the structure of rural household income in Kenya in 1982; to discover changes since 1975 in agriculture and assets with special attention to the impact of the coffee boom; to assess access to government services and health, education, water, wood and sewage.
      
   10. Sub-Saharan Comparative Firm-level Data
       Standard earnings and production functions for the manufacturing sector of five African countries, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The data set is unusual in having measures of both physical and human capital.
   11. Tanzania Firms (RPED & TMES)
       This is a comprehensive panel data set on a sample of firms within the Tanzanian manufacturing sector. This data was collected over the period 1993 to 1995 in a series of three annual surveys, referred to here as Waves I – III, as part of the Regional Program on Enterprise Development (RPED) organised by the World Bank and funded by bilateral donor governments. The data was collected by a team from the Helsinki School of Economics, in collaboration with the Tanzanian Confederation of Industries and the University of Dar es Salaam.
7. Baboons in the Amboseli Basin (BABASE)
   The Amboseli Baboon Project is one of the longest-running studies of wild primates in the world. Focused on the savannah baboon, Papio cynocephalus, ABRP is located in the Amboseli ecosystem of East Africa, north of Mt. Kilimanjaro. We track hundreds of known individuals in several social groups over the course of their entire lives. We currently monitor around 300 animals, but over the last four decades we have accumulated life history information on over 1,500 animals. Research at ABRP has long centered on processes at the individual, group, and population levels, and in recent years has also included other aspects of baboon biology, such as genetics, hormones, nutrition, hybridization, parasitology, and relations with other species.
8. A Week in the Life Study
   The Week in the Life Study uses mobile touchscreen devices to understand how adolescents’ daily experiences affect their mental and physical well-being in everyday life. In doing so, the study aims to answer the following questions:
   What are the most frequently experienced stressors (negative events) and uplifts (positive events) in adolescents’ daily lives?What effects do these everyday stressors and uplifts have on adolescents’ behavior, self-regulation, and health? Can individual differences (such as personality and genetics) help identify which adolescents are more sensitive to their daily experiences than others? Our hope is that this work will provide new ideas for educators, researchers, and others regarding which everyday experiences have the strongest effects on adolescents’ well-being, and whether adolescents who are typically viewed as “at-risk” may also be the most likely to benefit from intervention and enrichment activities.
9. The Great Smoky Mountains Study
   The Great Smoky Mountains Study (GSMS) is a longitudinal, population-based community survey of children and adolescents in North Carolina. Some of the goals of the study are to estimate the number of youth with emotional and behavioral disorders, the persistence of those disorders over time, the need for and use of services for emotional and behavioral disorders, and the possible risk factors for developing emotional and behavioral disorders. The participants in GSMS include 1,073 children aged 9 through 16, and their parents, from 11 counties in western North Carolina.
10. Geographically based economic data, Yale University
    The G-Econ research project is devoted to developing a geophysically based data set on economic activity for the world. The current data set (GEcon 4.0) is now publicly available and covers “gross cell product” for all regions for 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005 and includes 27,500 terrestrial observations. The basic metric is the regional equivalent of gross domestic product. Gross cell product (GCP) is measured at a 1-degree longitude by 1-degree latitude resolution at a global scale.

Food Security

• For Food Security Public Data, visit International Food Security at Illinois (IFSI).