Nov 14 -- The Census Bureau, Department of Commerce, invites comment by January 16, 2024 regarding the proposed extension of the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data collection.
A 21st century statistical system must provide information about the dynamic economy quickly, using data assets efficiently while minimizing the burden of collecting and providing data and fully preserving confidentiality. The Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) data infrastructure has demonstrated the power and usefulness of linking multiple business and employee data sets with state-of-the-art confidentiality protections to build a longitudinal national frame of jobs.
LEHD supports the Department of Commerce plan to improve American competitiveness and measures of innovation. It provides Federal, State, and local policymakers and planners, businesses, private sector decision makers, and Congress with comprehensive and timely national, State, and local information on the dynamic nature of employers and employees.
LEHD significantly reduces the overall effort for the generation of its quarterly data product by:
-- Leveraging existing Federal administrative and State data
-- Avoiding costs required to expand existing surveys to collect the information directly
-- Reducing respondent burden by limiting the number of required resources to just the owners of the required data
LEHD is a result of the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Partnership. The LED Partnership is a partnership between the US Census Bureau and the Labor Market Information (LMI) agencies from 50 States, the District of Columbia, and the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands. This partnership supports the development, promotion, and distribution of the following public-use data products:
• Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI)—LEHD's flagship data product is the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) which provides 32 statistical indicators on employment, job creation and destruction, accessions (hires and recalls), and separations (e.g., exits and layoffs). These statistics are released for the following by-groups for all quarters for which data are available for each partner State:
○ County, metropolitan, and workforce development area
○ Age, sex, race, and ethnicity categories
○ Business characteristics (i.e., detailed industry ownership type, firm age, firm size)
• LEHD Origin Destination Employment Statistics (LODES)—LODES data provide detailed spatial distributions of workers' employment and residential locations and the relation between the two at the Census Block level. LODES also provides characteristic detail on age, earnings, industry distributions, and other worker/business characteristics.
• Job-to-Job Flows (J2J)—Job-to-Job Flows (J2J) is a set of statistics on job mobility in the United States constructed by the LEHD program. J2J include statistics on: (1) the job-to-job transition rate, (2) hires and separations to and from employment, (3) earnings changes due to job change, and (4) characteristics of origin and destination jobs for job-to-job transitions. These statistics are available at the national, State, and metropolitan area levels and by worker and firm characteristics.
• Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO)—Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) is an experimental set of statistics on the earnings and employment outcomes of graduates of select post-secondary institutions in the United States, and is constructed using data from LEHD. Earnings Outcomes reports earnings by institution, degree field, degree level and graduation cohort for 1, 5 and 10 years after graduation. Employment Flows tabulations provide the destination industry and geography of employment for graduates of an institution by degree level, degree field, and graduation cohort, for one, five, and 10 years after graduation. A limited number of institutions are available as part of the pilot release, but future updates will include additional post-secondary institutions.
These data products highlight state and local labor market dynamics that cannot be learned from other statistical sources and are therefore used in many different arenas. For example, the QWI can be used as local-labor-market controls in regression analysis; to identify long-term trends; to provide local context in performance evaluations; and for a host of other applications.
The collection of data occurs in accordance with the rules established by interagency agreements with the participating State partners or data sharing agreements that have been established within the Census Bureau. For State partners, their data is submitted directly to the Census secure servers where Personally Identifiable Information (PII) goes through a process to replace it with Protected Identification Keys (PIK). This PVS (Person Identification Validation System) process also applies to all other administrative data that are used in the LEHD infrastructure. For all other required administration data, they are transferred or referenced by the LEHD production system. Data collection and processing also includes activities such as validation of data quality.
LEHD's data products are not generated by a traditional survey. Rather, all input data required is collected electronically as follows:
-- State Unemployment Insurance (UI) and Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) are provided via encrypted File Transfer Protocol (FTP) through which each State LMI agency sends these data directly to the Census Bureau. This transfer of data is governed by Memorandum of Understandings (MOUs) with each State partner.
-- Federal and Census Administrative data are acquired from other directorates or divisions within the Census Bureau with which an internal agreement has been established for the use of the data.
-- Public Use data sets are acquired from publicly available websites or public File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers.
LEHD:
https://lehd.ces.census.gov/
Draft technical documentation:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/wdi4fbq3udsdsjn1nuokx/h?rlkey=i6ea6uo3sbawg7vxag7zyqj8e&dl=0
FRN:
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-25021