GEOGRAPHICAL CROSSWALKS
Crosswalk files for US counties across changing boundary definitions, 1790–present.
collaborators Eckert · Gvirtz · Liang · Peters
paper A Method to Construct Geographical Crosswalks with an Application to US Counties since 1790 · NBER #26770
info Empirical researchers often have to map data provided for a “reporting” spatial unit, say counties in 1900, to a “reference” one, say, counties in 2010. We discuss a general method to create such crosswalks: computing the share of the area of each reporting unit nested in a given reference unit. Using these shares, data can be re-aggregated from the reporting to the reference units. We apply the method to construct a crosswalk for mapping US county-level data from 1790 to 2010 to present-day county or commuting zone delineations. We also provide the code to generate other crosswalks given maps of reporting and reference units.
us county crosswalks 1990 Counties · 2010 Counties · 1990 Commuting Zones · Replication Package · Github Repo · Crosswalk Readme · Usage Example · Example Readme
us commuting zone shapefile 1990 · Source
creating general geographical crosswalks Python Codes · Github Repo · Readme
other ready-made crosswalks Census Tracts 1970–2010 · County Longitudinal Template · Hornbeck county boundary fixes 1880–1910
citation Fabian Eckert, Andrés Gvirtz, Jack Liang, and Michael Peters. “A Method to Construct Geographical Crosswalks with an Application to US Counties since 1790.” NBER Working Paper #26770, 2020