Longitudinal Employment and Household Dynamics (LEHD)

The Longitudinal Employment and Household Dynamics (LEHD) program is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. LEHD is potentially an alternate/additional source of place of work and flow data. LEHD links State Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) with federal administrative records. We encourage the transportation community to evaluate these data at small geography and identify problem areas and approaches to improve data quality.

Some examples of currently available data from LEHD include:

• LEHD's On the Map V2 is being released (May - September 2007) reflecting 2004 QCEW (formerly called ES-202) records. This release will include 44 states. On the Map provides dynamic web-based maps that show the relationship between where people live and where they work, by county, city and census tract and block. Much of the data is modeled or synthesized, so that individual confidentiality is protected. QCEW records are submitted to the Census Bureau by each participating State. As the quality of the QCEW and the Multiple Worksite Report (MWR) varies widely by State,
  Caution! USDOT recommends that this data be carefully reviewed before use in any transportation application.

• LEHD's Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) which links employer unemployment insurance filings and employee wage records to provide data on jobs created, separations, turnover, average wages, by industry, gender, and age of workers. The geography is limited to county, and metro areas.

LEHD expects to build linkages between employer-employee data sets and others to trace job patterns for various populations.

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Communication:

• Sign-up for the LEHD Local Transportation Dynamics Listserv

Data Access:

• LEHD "On the Map" Version 3

• LEHD Portal at the Census Bureau

• QWI Public Use for download from Cornell University

Papers:

• An Evaluation of the Use of LEHD Data for Transportation Planning (September, 2003)

• Evaluating the Local Employment Dynamic Program as an Alternate Source of Place of Work Data For Use by Transportation Planners TRB Conference on Census Data for Transportation Planning, Irvine, CA, May 2005

• Understanding LEHD and Synthetic Home To Work Flows In "On The Map"

Presentations:

• Powerpoint on Issues with LEHD, developed by Elaine Murakami, FHWA in HTML and PPT (1.3 MB) format.

• Why transportation planners want small area data. (PDF 1 MB) LEHD annual conference, Washington D.C., January 2006.