Stata crosswalk between city names and IPUMS city codes

[Zach Hethmon]

Hey everyone, first post here so hopefully I'll get the format right.

I have a data set with cities as names e.g. "Atlanta", "New York", "Los Angeles", etc. These string data type names need to be converted into numerical codes. IPUMS has a list here: (https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/var...#codes_section) but its not in any easy to use format. Does anyone know of a crosswalk that will convert between the two?

P.S. Using Stata 13.1

Thanks!

[Joe Canner]

Zach,

According to the IPUMS website, their codes for cities are consistent with US Census "places", which is probably a better system to use. See https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/codes/place.html to download a file that has the Census crosswalk. See http://www.census.gov/geo/reference/pdfs/GARM/Ch9GARM.pdf for more information on how these are defined.

Let us know if you need any specific Stata help employing the crosswalk.

Regards,
Joe

[Zach Hethmon]

Joe,

Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately I think IPUMS means their definitions of cities jives with those of the US Census places however they use different codes because a quick manual check showed the numeric codes to be very different between the two.

Zach

[Sergiy Radyakin]

I guess the codes are more accessible here, but I haven't checked if everything matches exactly.
gisfiles.wm.edu/sabins/codebook_for_IPUMS_extract_konort.docx
Sergiy

[Joe Canner]

Zach,

I'm not sure I understand your goal, then. Your original post seemed to indicate that you were looking for a way to convert city names into numeric codes and that IPUMS was one potential way of doing that. Even if the Census and IPUMS codes are different, using the Census codes seems like a reasonable way to go if you are just looking for a numeric coding system, especially given that the Census is much more of a recognized standard than IPUMS. Or are you specifically interested in IPUMS for some other reason?

Regards,
Joe