Revising OCCSCORE for Analysis of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Census Data

Daniel Redish, University of Minnesota
J. David Hacker, University of Minnesota

Occupational income score (occscore) is the most commonly used measure of socioeconomic status in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series datasets. Unfortunately, the measure was constructed using data from the 1950 census and may not be a good fit to earlier data. Different occupations may have earned relatively more or less in the nineteenth century than they did in 1950. In this paper I use the value of the personal estate (persprop) and real estate (realprop) wealth collected by the 1860 and 1870 censuses to evaluate how well the 1950 occscore fits perspro and realprop, and use this data to suggest a revised occscore for the nineteenth century.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 70. Wrangling Occupational and Denominational Data