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LEHD Infrastructure S2014 files in the FSRDC
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-27R
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau, with the support of several national research agencies, maintains a set of infrastructure files using administrative data provided by state agencies, enhanced with information from other administrative data sources, demographic and economic (business) surveys and censuses. The LEHD Infrastructure Files provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of workers, employers, and their interaction in the U.S. economy. This document describes the structure and content of the 2014 Snapshot of the LEHD Infrastructure files as they are made available in the Census Bureau's secure and restricted-access Research Data Center network. The document attempts to provide a comprehensive description of all researcher-accessible files, of their creation, and of any modifications made to the files to facilitate researcher access.
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Documenting the Business Register and Related Economic Business Data
March 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-17
The Business Register (BR) is a comprehensive database of business establishments in the United States and provides resources for the U.S. Census Bureau's economic programs for sample selection, research, and survey operations. It is maintained using information from several federal agencies including the Census Bureau, Internal Revenue Service, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Social Security Administration. This paper provides a detailed description of the sources and functions of the BR. An overview of the BR as a linking tool and bridge to other Census Bureau data for additional business characteristics is also given.
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A Portrait of Firms that Invest in R&D
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-41
We focus on the evolution and behavior of firms that invest in research and development (R&D). We build upon the cross-sectional analysis in Foster and Grim (2010) that identified the characteristics of top R&D spending firms and follow up by charting the behavior of these firms over time. Our focus is dynamic in nature as we merge micro-level cross-sectional data from the Survey of Industrial Research and Development (SIRD) and the Business Research & Development and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) with the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). The result is a panel firm-level data set from 1992 to 2011 that tracks firms' performances as they enter and exit the R&D surveys. Using R&D expenditures to proxy R&D performance, we find the top R&D performing firms in the U.S. across all years to be large, old, multinational enterprises. However, we also find that the composition of R&D performing firms is gradually shifting more towards smaller domestic firms with expenditures being less sensitive to scale effects. We find a high degree of persistence for these firms over time. We chart the history of R&D performing firms and compare them to all firms in the economy and find substantial differences in terms of age, size, firm structure and international activity; these differences persist when looking at future firm outcomes.
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LEHD Infrastructure files in the Census RDC - Overview
June 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-26
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau, with the support of several national research agencies, maintains a set of infrastructure files using administrative data provided by state agencies, enhanced with information from other administrative data sources, demographic and economic (business) surveys and censuses. The LEHD Infrastructure Files provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of workers, employers, and their interaction in the U.S. economy. This document describes the structure and content of the 2011 Snapshot of the LEHD Infrastructure files as they are made available in the Census Bureaus secure and restricted-access Research Data Center network. The document attempts to provide a comprehensive description of all researcher-accessible files, of their creation, and of any modifcations made to the files to facilitate researcher access.
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LEHD Data Documentation LEHD-OVERVIEW-S2008-rev1
December 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-43
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LEHD Infrastructure Files in the Census RDC: Overview of S2004 Snapshot
April 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-13
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau, with the support of several national research agencies, has built a set of infrastructure files using administrative data provided by state agencies, enhanced with information from other administrative data sources, demographic and economic (business) surveys and censuses. The LEHD Infrastructure Files provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of workers, employers, and their interaction in the U.S. economy. This document describes the structure and content of the 2004 Snapshot of the LEHD Infrastructure files as they are made available in the Census Bureau's Research Data Center network.
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Characteristics of the Top R&D Performing Firms in the U.S.: Evidence from the Survey of Industrial R&D
September 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-33
Innovation drives economic growth and productivity growth, and as such, indicators of innovative activity such as research and development (R&D) expenditures are of paramount importance. We combine Census confidential microdata from two sources in order to examine the characteristics of the top R&D performing firms in the U.S. economy. We use the Survey of Industrial Research and Development (SIRD) to identify the top 200 R&D performing firms in 2003 and, to the extent possible, to trace the evolution of these firms from 1957 to 2007. The Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) further extends our knowledge about these firms and enables us to make comparisons to the U.S. economy. By linking the SIRD and the LBD we are able to create a detailed portrait of the evolution of the top R&D performing firms in the U.S.
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An Analysis of Key Differences in Micro Data: Results from the Business List Comparison Project
September 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-28
The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census each maintain a business register, a universe of all U.S. business establishments and their characteristics, created from independent sources. Both registers serve critical functions such as supplying aggregate data inputs for certain national statistics generated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. This paper examines key micro-level differences across these two business registers.
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The LEHD Infrastructure Files and the Creation of the Quarterly Workforce Indicators
January 2006
Working Paper Number:
tp-2006-01
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau,
with the support of several national research agencies, has built a set of infrastructure files
using administrative data provided by state agencies, enhanced with information from other administrative
data sources, demographic and economic (business) surveys and censuses. The LEHD
Infrastructure Files provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of workers, employers, and their
interaction in the U.S. economy. Beginning in 2003 and building on this infrastructure, the Census
Bureau has published the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI), a new collection of data series
that offers unprecedented detail on the local dynamics of labor markets. Despite the fine detail,
confidentiality is maintained due to the application of state-of-the-art confidentiality protection
methods. This article describes how the input files are compiled and combined to create the infrastructure
files. We describe the multiple imputation methods used to impute in missing data and
the statistical matching techniques used to combine and edit data when a direct identifier match
requires improvement. Both of these innovations are crucial to the success of the final product. Finally,
we pay special attention to the details of the confidentiality protection system used to protect
the identity and micro data values of the underlying entities used to form the published estimates.
We provide a brief description of public-use and restricted-access data files with pointers to further
documentation for researchers interested in using these data.
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NEW DATA FOR DYNAMIC ANALYSIS: THE LONGITUDINAL ESTABLISHMENT AND ENTERPRISE MICRODATA (LEEM) FILE
December 1999
Working Paper Number:
CES-99-18
Until now, research on U.S. business activities over time has been hindered by the lack of accurate and comprehensive longitudinal data. The new Longitudinal Establishment and Enterprise Microdata (LEEM) are tremendously rich data that open up numerous possibilities for dynamic analyses of businesses in the U.S. economy. It is the first nationwide high-quality longitudinal database that covers the majority of employer businesses from all sectors of the economy. Due to the confidential nature of these data, the file is located at the Center for Economic Studies in the U.S. Bureau of the Census. To access the data, researchers must submit an acceptable proposal to CES and become sworn Census researchers. This paper describes the LEEM file, the variables contained on the file, and current uses of the data.
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