COUNTY BUSINESS PATTERNS DATABASE

Imputed county-industry employment data from the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns, 1975–2018.

collaborators Eckert · Fort · Schott · Yang

paper Imputing Missing Values in the US Census Bureau's County Business Patterns · NBER #26632

info The County Business Patterns data published by the US Census Bureau track employment by county and industry from 1946 to the present. Two features of the data limit their usefulness to researchers: (1) employment for the majority of county-industry cells is suppressed to protect confidentiality, and (2) industry classifications change over time. We address both issues. First, we develop a linear programming method that exploits the large set of adding-up constraints implicit in the hierarchical arrangement of the data to impute missing employment. Second, we provide concordances to map all data to a consistent set of industry codes. Finally, we construct a user-friendly, 1975 to 2018 county-level panel that classifies industries according to a consistent set of 2012 NAICS codes in all years.

updates we may periodically update the imputed data. if you enter an email address below we will notify you of such changes.

full county×industry panel 1975–2018 panel with native industry codes · panel with harmonized 2012 NAICS industry codes · readme

note: census changed the way the CBP data are reported starting in 2017. for these years, census now perturbs cells with small employment counts, making these data fundamentally different from earlier periods. we do not impute data in those years since there are no missing cells in the data. we nevertheless appended 2017 and 2018 to the panel for completeness. note that the 2017 and 2018 data are reported on a NAICS2017 basis.

raw and imputed cbp files 1975  1976  1977  1978  1979  1980  1981  1982  1983  1984  1985  1986  1987  1988  1989  1990  1991  1992  1993  1994  1995  1996  1997  1998  1999  2000  2001  2002  2003  2004  2005  2006  2007  2008  2009  2010  2011  2012  2013  2014  2015  2016  readme

concordances raw industry concordance files · final industry concordance files · readme

code all codes needed to replicate the imputation are on our public github repo.

citation Fabian Eckert, Teresa C. Fort, Peter K. Schott, and Natalie J. Yang. “Imputing Missing Values in the US Census Bureau's County Business Patterns.” NBER Working Paper #26632, 2021