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LEHD Snapshot Documentation, Release S2021_R2022Q4
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-51
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) data at the U.S. Census Bureau is a quarterly database of linked employer-employee data covering over 95% of employment in the United States. These data are used to produce a number of public-use tabulations and tools, including the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI), LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES), Job-to-Job Flows (J2J), and Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) data products. Researchers on approved projects may also access the underlying LEHD microdata directly, in the form of the LEHD Snapshot restricted-use data product. This document provides a detailed overview of the LEHD Snapshot as of release S2021_R2022Q4, including user guidance, variable codebooks, and an overview of the approvals needed to obtain access. Updates to the documentation for this and future snapshot releases will be made available in HTML format on the LEHD website.
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Trade Liberalization and Labor-Market Outcomes: Evidence from US Matched Employer-Employee Data
September 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-42
We use matched employer-employee data to examine outcomes among workers initially employed within and outside manufacturing after trade liberalization with China. We find that exposure to this shock operates predominantly through workers' counties (versus industries), that larger own industry and downstream exposure typically reduce relative earnings, and that greater upstream exposure often raises them. The latter is particularly important outside manufacturing: while we find substantial and persistent predicted declines in relative earnings among manufacturing workers, those outside manufacturing are generally predicted to experience relative earnings gains. Investigation of employment reactions indicates they account for a small share of the earnings effect.
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Male Earnings Volatility in LEHD before, during, and after the Great Recession
September 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-31
This paper is part of a coordinated collection of papers on prime-age male earnings volatility. Each paper produces a similar set of statistics for the same reference population using a different primary data source. Our primary data source is the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) infrastructure files. Using LEHD data from 1998 to 2016, we create a well-defined population frame to facilitate accurate estimation of temporal changes comparable to designed longitudinal samples of people. We show that earnings volatility, excluding increases during recessions, has declined over the analysis period, a finding robust to various sensitivity analyses. Although we find volatility is declining, the effect is not homogeneous, particularly for workers with tenuous labor force attachment for whom volatility is increasing. These 'not stable' workers have earnings volatility approximately 30 times larger than stable workers, but more important for earnings volatility trends we observe a large increase in the share of stable employment from 60% in 1998 to 67% in 2016, which we show to largely be responsible for the decline in overall earnings volatility. To further emphasize the importance of not stable and/or low earning workers we also conduct comparisons with the PSID and show how changes over time in the share of workers at the bottom tail of the cross-sectional earnings distributions can produce either declining or increasing earnings volatility trends.
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Between Firm Changes in Earnings Inequality: The Dominant Role of Industry Effects
February 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-08
We find that most of the rising between firm earnings inequality that dominates the overall increase in inequality in the U.S. is accounted for by industry effects. These industry effects stem from rising inter-industry earnings differentials and not from changing distribution of employment across industries. We also find the rising inter-industry earnings differentials are almost completely accounted for by occupation effects. These results link together the key findings from separate components of the recent literature: one focuses on firm effects and the other on occupation effects. The link via industry effects challenges conventional wisdom.
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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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The Employee Clientele of Corporate Leverage: Evidence from Personal Labor Income Diversification
January 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-01
Using employee job-level data, we empirically test the equilibrium matching between a firm's debt usage and its employee job risk aversion ('clientele effect'), as predicted by the existing theories. We measure job risk aversion for a firm's employees using their labor income concentration in the firm, calculated as the fraction of the employees' total personal labor income or total household labor
income that is accounted for by their income from this particular firm. Using a sample of about 1,400 U.S. public firms from 1990-2008, we find a robust negative relation between leverage and employee job risk aversion, which is consistent with the clientele effect. Specifically, when a firm's existing employees have higher labor income concentration in it, the firm tends to have lower contemporaneous and future leverage. Moreover, in terms of new hires, firms with lower leverage are more likely to recruit employees with less alternative labor income. Our results continue to hold after we control for firm fixed effects, other employee characteristics such as wages, gender, age, race, and education, and managerial risk attitudes. Further, the matching between a firm's leverage and its workers' labor income concentration in it is more pronounced for firms with higher labor intensity and those in financial distress.
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Total Error and Variability Measures with Integrated Disclosure Limitation for Quarterly Workforce Indicators and LEHD Origin Destination Employment Statistics in On The Map
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-71
We report results from the rst comprehensive total quality evaluation of five major indicators in the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI): total employment, beginning-of-quarter employment, full-quarter employment, total payroll, and average monthly earnings of full-quarter employees. Beginning-of-quarter employment is also the main tabulation variable in the LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) workplace reports as displayed in OnTheMap (OTM). The evaluation is conducted by generating multiple threads of the edit and imputation models used in the LEHD Infrastructure File System. These threads conform to the Rubin (1987) multiple imputation model, with each thread or implicate being the output of formal probability models that address coverage, edit, and imputation errors. Design-based sampling variability and nite population corrections are also included in the evaluation. We derive special formulas for the Rubin total variability and its components that are consistent with the disclosure avoidance system used for QWI and LODES/OTM workplace reports. These formulas allow us to publish the complete set of detailed total quality measures for QWI and LODES. The analysis reveals that the five publication variables under study are estimated very accurately for tabulations involving at least 10 jobs. Tabulations involving three to nine jobs have quality in the range generally deemed acceptable. Tabulations involving zero, one or two jobs, which are generally suppressed in the QWI and synthesized in LODES, have substantial total variability but their publication in LODES allows the formation of larger custom aggregations, which will in general have the accuracy estimated for tabulations in the QWI based on a similar number of workers.
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Two Perspectives on Commuting: A Comparison of Home to Work Flows Across Job-Linked Survey and Administrative Files
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-34
Commuting flows and workplace employment data have a wide constituency of users including urban and regional planners, social science and transportation researchers, and businesses. The U.S. Census Bureau releases two, national data products that give the magnitude and characteristics of home to work flows. The American Community Survey (ACS) tabulates households' responses on employment, workplace, and commuting behavior. The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program tabulates administrative records on jobs in the LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES). Design differences across the datasets lead to divergence in a comparable statistic: county-to-county aggregate commute flows. To understand differences in the public use data, this study compares ACS and LEHD source files, using identifying information and probabilistic matching to join person and job records. In our assessment, we compare commuting statistics for job frames linked on person, employment status, employer, and workplace and we identify person and job characteristics as well as design features of the data frames that explain aggregate differences. We find a lower rate of within-county commuting and farther commutes in LODES. We attribute these greater distances to differences in workplace reporting and to uncertainty of establishment assignments in LEHD for workers at multi-unit employers. Minor contributing factors include differences in residence location and ACS workplace edits. The results of this analysis and the data infrastructure developed will support further work to understand and enhance commuting statistics in both datasets.
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Food and Agricultural Industries: Opportunities
for Improving Measurement and Reporting
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-58
We measure one component of off-farm food and agricultural industries using establishment
level microdata in the federal statistical system. We focus on services for crop production, and compare measures of firm and employment dynamics in this sector during the period 1992-2012 with county-level publicly available data for the same measures. Based on differences across data sources, we establish new facts regarding the evolution of food and agricultural industries, and demonstrate the value of working with confidential microdata. In addition to the data and results we present, we highlight possibilities for collaboration across universities and federal agencies to improve reporting in other segments of food and agricultural industries.
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Hires and Separations in Equilibrium
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-57
Hiring occurs primarily to fill vacant slots that occur when workers separate. Equivalently, separation occurs to move workers to better alternatives. A model of efficient separations yields several specific predictions. Labor market churn is most likely when mean wages are low and the variance in wages is high. Additionally, over the business cycle, churn decreases during recessions, with hires falling at the beginning of recessions and separations declining later to match hiring. Furthermore, the young disproportionately bear the brunt of employment declines. More generally, hires and separations are positively correlated over time as well as across industry and firm. These predictions are borne out in the LEHD microdata at the economy and firm level.
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