Occupational Wages around the World (OWW) Database

Richard B. Freeman

Harvard University

National Bureau of Economic Research

London School of Economics

Remco H. Oostendorp

Free University Amsterdam

Tinbergen Institute

Amsterdam Institute for International Development

This database contains occupational wage data for 161 occupations in over 150 countries from 1983 to 2003. The occupational wage data are derived from the ILO October Inquiry database (http://laborsta.ilo.org, Table 01) by calibrating the data into a normalized wage rate for each occupation. The normalized wages refer to average monthly wage rates for male workers.

DATA

OWW2 database

Stata
(self-extracting, original)

Stata
(uncompressed)

ASCII
comma-separated variables

ASCII
Tab-delimited

oww2.zip (1.6 Mb)

oww2.dta (5.2 Mb)

oww2.csv (17 Mb)

oww2.asc (17 Mb)

You will need a major database, statistical program, or programming language to use these files. This dataset is too large to load completely into MS Excel 2000, which has a maximum of 65,536 observations, though Access can be used to read the ASCII datafile. Users without STATA may be interested in STAT/TRANSFER. This program can translate STATA files into other formats including other statistical packages, database packages and spreadsheets. Among statistical packages supports are SPSS, SAS, and Systat.

Documentation

Technical documentation pdf doc txt

Variable List

The database contains the following variables:

OWW2

Variable Label

y0

year

y1

country code (from ILO October Inquiry)

country

country code (from World Development Indicators)

y3

industry code (from ILO October Inquiry)

y4

occupation code (from ILO October Inquiry)

x1

standard data LCU

x2wu

country-specific calibration (uni) LCU

x3wu

country-specific calibration with imputation (uni) LCU

x4wu

uniform calibration (uni) LCU

x2wl

country-specific calibration (lex) LCU

x3wl

country-specific calibration with imputation (lex) LCU

x4wl

uniform calibration (lex) LCU standard data LCU

x1us

standard data US$

x2wlus

country-specific calibration (lex) US$

x3wlus

country-specific calibration with imputation (lex) US$

x4wlus

uniform calibration (lex) US$

x2wuus

country-specific calibration (uni) US$

x3wuus

country-specific calibration with imputation (uni) US$

x4wuus

uniform calibration (uni) US$

Calibration Info

 

Different calibration procedures have been used to normalize the data, and the suffix to the variable x indicates which calibration method has been used:

x1

wage reported in standard format in raw data

x2wu

wage with country-specific calibration, uniform weighting

x2wl

wage with country-specific calibration, lexicographic weighting

x3wu

wage with country-specific and uniform calibration, uniform weighting

x3wl

wage with country-specific and uniform calibration, lexicographic weighting

x4wu

wage with uniform calibration, uniform weighting

x4wl

wage with uniform calibration, lexicographic weighting

 

It is recommended to start any analysis conservatively with the non-standardized data x1 and to use the standardized data x2 and x3 (with increasing levels of data imputation) only if the basic results remain unaffected. If the basic results are unaffected then the standardized wage with country-specific and uniform calibration and lexicographic weighting is recommended for use because it provides the largest sample. The standardized data x4 do not use country-specific calibration and correspond to the standardization variant 2 in the prior release of the data (see NBER Working Paper #8058, table A.1) and has commonly been used in analyses so far. Hence we include this type of standard(ized) data for comparison.

QUESTIONS AND INFORMATION

If you have any questions about the OWW database please contact:
Remco Oostendorp
Free University

De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam
email: roostendorp@feweb.vu.nl

Last update: September 13, 2005

Created by Jean Roth February 6, 2