Comparative Panel File (CPF) 2.0 Information and Manual [v.1]

In this manual, we present the design and content of the CPF, explain the logic of the project, workflow, and technical details. We also describe the CPF’s open-science platform. The first version of CPF was prepared by Konrad Turek, Thomas Leopold and Matthijs Kalmijn, and published in December 2020.The Comparative Panel File (CPF) harmonizes household panel data from seven of the world’s most important longitudinal surveys: Australia (HILDA), Germany (SOEP), Great Britain (BHPS/UKHLS), South Korea (KLIPS), Switzerland (SHP), the United States (PSID), and the Netherlands (LISS). These studies offer rich, multi-decade information on individuals and households.The project aims to support the social science community in analyzing comparative life course data. CPF provides open-source Stata code that links and harmonizes these data into a unified three-level panel structure, enabling comparative life course and social science research. The project is designed for flexibility—users can customize the code to suit their own variables, countries, and samples. It supports both straightforward use and advanced extensions. CPF is not a data product, but a community-driven harmonization tool. Users must download original data from national sources and apply the CPF code to generate the harmonized dataset.