County Business Patterns Database

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 in practice: employment for the majority of county-industry cells is suppressed to protect confidentiality; and 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.<br><br>In this repository, we provide the original CBP data and the imputed data files for all years from 1977 to 2016. We also provide industry concordances for the various SIC and NAICS vintages.<br><br>Github Repo with imputation codes: https://github.com/fpeckert/cbp_database_public<br><br>