The Longitudinal Database

• Activity Number: 205
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Business & Economics Statistics Section*
• Author(s): Ron Jarmin*+ and Javier Miranda
• Affiliation(s): U.S. Census Bureau and American University/U.S. Census Bureau
• Keywords: LBD ; Microdata ; Census ; Establishment ; Longitudinal

Abstract

This paper describes the development and characteristics of the newly created Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). The LBD was constructed at the U.S. Census Bureau's Center for Economic Studies (CES). The LBD links active business establishments contained in annual files of the Census Bureau's business register. It contains information on employment, payroll, location and ownership for most U.S. business establishments from 1974 to 2000. Previously, longitudinal establishment data were available only for the manufacturing sector. The LBD also contains establishment level links to all Census Bureau censuses and surveys. The LBD, therefore, gives researchers at the Census Bureau a powerful tool to track changes in the structure of the U.S. economy.

This paper describes how the LBD was constructed and our plans to improve and continuously update it. This includes a description of the Bureau's business register, the Standard Statistical Establishment List, or SSEL, which provides the core data for the LBD. We then examine some descriptive statistics about the LBD.