A couple of years ago I did a research project using the current population survey (CPS) from the BLS and I was surprised about how much interesting data there

A couple of years ago I did a research project using the current population survey (CPS) from the BLS and I was surprised about how much interesting data there is. I'm not sure if they've improved since 2011, but at the time it was very hard to parse and order the public data sets since the headers have changed so much over time and the data is not harmonized. I can't tell if BLS has done much data consolidation through this API, but if you're looking to consume this data I recommend just downloading it and parsing it yourself. The IPUMS project from the University of Minnesota[1] is an excellent resource for anyone actually wanting to look at BLS / CPS data over time. They do a lot of the gruntwork for gathering CPS results across the years and synthesizing the various codes, field names, and standards into a coherent data set. For anyone interested in actually using CPS data, a colleague and I wrote a (rather shitty) Java program to parse IPUMS data into a local longitudinal dataset. The code was written by sophomores in college, so I can't promise that this code is any good, but it's probably a good place to get started if you're interested[2]. [1] http://www.ipums.org/ http://www.ipums.org/ [2] https://github.com/c-johnson/CPSMatcher https://github.com/c-johnson/CPSMatcher