README.txt

Replication archive for:

Rothstein, Jesse.  The Great Recession and its Aftermath: What Role for 
Structural Changes? July 2016. Forthcoming, The Russell Sage Foundation Journal 
of the Social Sciences.

Creation date:  July 2016.
Last substantive revision:  July 2016.
Last revision:  August 2016.

This archive contains programs, logs, and data to produce the results in the 
above paper. The archive, as it exists on my computer, contains three main 
directories, plus some subdirectories:
  programs/            Contains Stata programs, log files, and output (.txt  
                         and .log files).  The key program is 
                         "labormarket2016.do," in the project root directory.
                         This program calls all other programs needed to 
                         prepare and analyze the data. It assumes that 
                         Stata-format CPS data files have been created 
                         previously, using the readrawcps.do program in the
                         readrawcps directory.
  readrawcps/          Contains supplemental .do and .dct files used to read 
                         the raw CPS data.  These files are not called by the
                         master "labormarket2016” program, but are assumed
                         to have been run before it is.
  rawdata/             Contains raw data files.  See readme.rawdata.txt file 
                         in that directory for descriptions.
    rawdata/cps        Contains all of the CPS monthly files from January
                         1978 through May 2016, in Stata form as created by 
                         the readrawcps.do program, then gzipped. These files 
                         take up 3.9 GB of disk space, and are not included 
                         in the distribution of this archive for space 
                         reasons. The raw data files can be obtained from 
                         http://www.bls.census.gov/cps_ftp.html#cpsbasic.
		          Please contact me if you have trouble obtaining them.
  intermediatedata/    Contains intermediate files created by the programs in 
                         the programs directory.
  figures/             Contains figures for paper.                       

The "manifest.txt" file contains a manifest for the entire archive, as it 
existed on my computer at the time of the most recent successful execution
of the main project .do file.  The distribution archive includes all files here,
except for the CPS data files in rawdata/cps and the files derived from them
in intermediatedata. It is broken into three parts:

1) rothstein-labormarket2016-programsresults.zip
     Contains all programs, log files, and figures, from the programs/, 
     readrawcps/ and figures/ directories.
2) rothstein-labormarket2016-rawdata-nocps.zip
     Contains all raw data files from rawdata/ directory, but not those
     from rawdata/cps.
3) rothstein-labormarket2016-intermediatedata-nocps.zip
     Contains intermediate files created by the programs in the project,
     except those including CPS microdata.
     
If needed, the excluded files from rawdata/cps/ and intermediatedata/ are 
available by request from the author.  But transferring these files is 
difficult due to their size.  Users are encouraged  to obtain the original 
CPS files from the FTP server noted above and to recreate the Stata versions 
by running the included readrawcps/readrawcps.do program themselves.

Included log files derive from execution of the programs/labormarket2016.do program --
which calls all other programs -- in August 2016, using Stata/MP 14.0 (born date 10 June 2015).