Redesigning the Longitudinal Business Database
May 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-08
Abstract
In this paper we describe the U.S. Census Bureau's redesign and production implementation of the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) first introduced by Jarmin and Miranda (2002). The LBD is used to create the Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS), tabulations describing the entry, exit, expansion, and contraction of businesses. The new LBD and BDS also incorporate information formerly provided by the Statistics of U.S. Businesses program, which produced similar year-to-year measures of employment and establishment flows. We describe in detail how the LBD is created from curation of the input administrative data, longitudinal matching, retiming of economic census-year births and deaths, creation of vintage consistent industry codes and noise factors, and the creation and cleaning of each year of LBD data. This documentation is intended to facilitate the proper use and understanding of the data by both researchers with approved projects accessing the LBD microdata and those using the BDS tabulations.
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:
data,
work census,
information census,
payroll,
enterprise,
database,
data census,
report,
quarterly,
census data,
agency,
acquisition,
accounting,
yearly,
longitudinal,
recession,
incorporated,
employment data,
economic census,
business data,
establishments data,
warehousing,
businesses census,
record,
census years,
use census,
census use
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:
Metropolitan Statistical Area,
Annual Survey of Manufactures,
Standard Statistical Establishment List,
Internal Revenue Service,
Standard Industrial Classification,
Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Social Security Administration,
Service Annual Survey,
Small Business Administration,
Longitudinal Research Database,
Center for Economic Studies,
County Business Patterns,
National Establishment Time Series,
Company Organization Survey,
Longitudinal Business Database,
Employer Identification Numbers,
Economic Census,
Research Data Center,
North American Industry Classification System,
Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics,
Business Register,
W-2,
Quarterly Workforce Indicators,
Business Employment Dynamics,
Disclosure Review Board,
CAAA,
Business Dynamics Statistics,
Federal Statistical Research Data Center,
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