Two Perspectives on Commuting and Workplace: A Microdata Comparison of Home-to-Work Flows Across Linked Survey and Administrative Files

• Activity Number: 25
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, July 31, 2016 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Business and Economic Statistics Section
• Author(s): Andrew Green* and Mark J. Kutzbach and Lars Vilhuber
• Companies: Cornell University/U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau and Cornell University
• Keywords: Employer-employee matched data ; ACS ; LODES ; LEHD ; Commuting

Abstract

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) and the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program's Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES). Differences in the domains, job definitions, and confidentiality protection measures across the datasets lead to divergence in comparable statistics, such as county-to-county aggregate commute flows. To understand differences in the underlying microdata, this study compares ACS and LEHD source files, using probabilistic matching to join survey responses with job records. In our assessment, we compare employment status, home and work locations, commute distance, and other job characteristics at a person level and identify person or job characteristics as well as characteristics of the data frames that explain these differences. Preliminary results indicate the importance of uncertainty regarding the workplace location and the resulting commute distance as an important factor. We assess the degree of workplace uncertainty in each dataset.