Preparing the sample of integrated labour market biographies (SIAB) for scientific analysis: a guide

Abstract

Preparing the Sample of Integrated Labour Market Biographies (SIAB) for scientific analysis is a complicated and error-prone task. This paper elaborates on the steps necessary to prepare the SIAB and provides examples of how the preparation can be done. Among other topics covered, we show how to generate and merge additional variables, impute right-censored wages, deal with parallel employment episodes, and clean the dataset. Finally, we present a case study on the individual long-term effects of job loss from plant closure to demonstrate how our prepared version of the SIAB can be used to carry out an empirical analysis. The supplementary material of this paper contains extensively commented Stata do-files to replicate our data preparation and the subsequent analysis.