con
Total Emp Gif

County Business Patterns Database

by Fabian Eckert, Teresa C. Fort, Peter K. Schott, and Natalie J. Yang


Imputing Missing Values in the US Census Bureau's County Business Patterns [01/21] [NBER WP #26632]


Abstract:

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 your 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  
Important: NB: 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  


Cleaning and Imputation Codes:

Find all codes needed to replicate the imputation on our public Github Repo.


If you use the data or code posted on this website please cite:

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

@techreport{eckert2021imputing,
title={Imputing Missing Values in the US Census Bureau's County Business Patterns},
author={Eckert, Fabian and Fort, Teresa C. and Schott, Peter K. and Yang, Natalie J.},
year={2021},
institution={National Bureau of Economic Research}
}