The CNEF Project has been continuously offering harmonized data for more than three decades. It exists and thrives because dedicated scholars from around the globe invest time, energy, and intellectual attention to harmonize, high quality panel data. They also use the data to produce insightful studies that use a cross-national research design. Each institute or university also supports the CNEF project directly (financially) or indirectly (allowing their researchers to work on CNEF-related tasks). The CNEF project is a true international collaboration between scholars worldwide. We rely on the CNEF community of scholars to maintain, improve, and expand researchers’ access to our harmonize panel data.
We harmonize original panel data to save time of both experienced and inexperienced researchers who want to use a cross-national research design. One of our operational principles is to be as transparent as possible about whether and how we construct variables. We aim to produce data that get probed, discussed, and challenged through the peer review publication process. Because of that, we feel comfortable providing the data to inexperienced researchers.
However, we count on, indeed rely on, the scrutiny of experienced researchers who sometimes identify or offer ways to correct errors or refine our harmonization process. To that end, we provide researchers with the algorithms we use to harmonize the parent survey data.
We construct a few variables with data that the original data provider cannot share with the public (to comply with privacy regulations). In those cases, CNEF still provides the code so that researchers may see the algorithm and, with permission of the original data provider, check and improve our harmonization process.
We also adhere to a second and very important principle to make the CNEF data more useful. We provide a person-specific identifier variable that researchers can use to merge yet to be harmonized original parent survey data to the harmonized CNEF variables. In this way, cross-national researchers can focus their attention and energy on harmonizing new variables they want to create. They can use existing harmonized CNEF variables as controls.
If/when their harmonized variables pass peer review, we consider them for inclusion in the set of harmonized CNEF variables w
The CNEF project does more than harmonize existing data. Most of our partners create new variables that are critically important to cross-national research. Primary among them are variables that document a household’s income before and after national (and sometimes local) governments tax the incomes and after the household has received transfer income from both public and private sources. These data are seldom available from the parent surveys. CNEF labels them as pre- and post-government income. They constitute a core part of the value CNEF adds for cross-national researchers. CNEF also includes household equivalence weights researchers commonly use to study the levels and evolution of income over time. We hope that the CNEF data prove useful for your research.
If you have questions, please email us at cnef@osu.edu.
Citation of any publications, reports, or papers using CNEF data can be reported on the 'Bibliography' page of this website and should include the following citation:
In Text: "The Cross-National Equivalent File project is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging (Grant: 5-R01AG040213-10) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grants: 1-R03HD091871-01, 1-R03HD100924-01) and was conducted by The Ohio State University."
In Reference: "Cross-National Equivalent File. Produced and distributed by The Ohio State University with funding from the National Institute on Aging (Grant: 5-R01AG040213-10) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grants: 1-R03HD091871-01, 1-R03HD100924-01), Columbus, OH."