Thursday, June 10, 2004

Life Insurance Data

Question

A student is looking for microdata on life insurance. More precisely on the amount of "life insurance bought" along with some demographic data.

Would someone have an idea if a survey would cover this topic?

Answer

A student at McGill was able to get data on life insurance by contacting the Life Insurance Institute of Canada directly. There is also an item in Survey of Household Spending for life insurance premiums.

Monday, June 7, 2004

Census Geography Reference Material

Question

A user here is hoping to find a non-PDF machine readable source that lists all changes in Census Subdivisions from 1981 through 2001, together with the coding and the CSD Type after each change. I suspect that she will have to go through each of the Standard Geographical Classifications, but hope to be pleasantly surprised.

Answer

The same information in a somewhat more usable format, ie as xls files, is available from the Interim list of changes to municipal boundaries, under DLI. We have pulled the files as per:
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/datalib/codebooks/cstdli/92f0009xpb.htm

On the DLI ftp site, the files are (or rather were) in
/dli/geography/1991/document/interim/ and in /dli/geography/1996/interim/