Piaactools: A program for data analysis with PIAAC data

Abstract

The OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is currently the only international survey of adult skills. It provides rich data on skills, work and life situations, earnings, and attitudes. To ensure representativeness and high reliability, the study is based on a complex survey design and advanced statistical methods. To obtain correct results from publicly available microdata, one must use special methods that are often too advanced for less experienced researchers. In this article, we present piaactools-a package of three commands that facilitate analysis with PIAAC data. The command piaacdes calculates basic statistics, piaactab computes frequencies of adults at each proficiency level, and piaacreg allows for the use of several regression models with PIAAC data. Output is saved as HTML files that can be opened in most spreadsheets and as Stata matrices that can be further processed in Stata. We also explain how to use these commands and provide examples that can be easily modified for use with different models and variables.