eCommons

DigitalCollections@ILR
ILR School
 

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

Other Titles

Abstract

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.

Journal / Series

Volume & Issue

Description

This paper is an older version of https://hdl.handle.net/1813/52611

Sponsorship

Vilhuber acknowledges funding through NSF grant SES-1131848 (NCRN Cornell)

Date Issued

2017-04

Publisher

Keywords

work flows; ACS; LEHD

Location

Effective Date

Expiration Date

Sector

Employer

Union

Union Local

NAICS

Number of Workers

Committee Chair

Committee Co-Chair

Committee Member

Degree Discipline

Degree Name

Degree Level

Related Version

Also available as Working Paper 17-34, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau. https://ideas.repec.org/p/cen/wpaper/17-34.html

Related DOI

Related To

Related Part

Based on Related Item

Has Other Format(s)

Part of Related Item

Related To

Related Publication(s)

Link(s) to Related Publication(s)

References

Link(s) to Reference(s)

Previously Published As

Government Document

ISBN

ISMN

ISSN

Other Identifiers

Rights

Rights URI

Types

article

Accessibility Feature

Accessibility Hazard

Accessibility Summary

Link(s) to Catalog Record