Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD)

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) program 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. This program 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. The LEHD program significantly reduces the overall effort for the generation of its quarterly data product by: • Leveraging exiting 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 The LEHD program is a member of a partnership between the US Census Bureau and the Labor Market Information (LMI) agencies from 49 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. This partnership supports the development, promotion, and distribution of the following data products: • QWI Public Use—The flagship data product of the LEHD program is the QWI Public Use 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 investment area - Age, sex, race, and ethnicity categories - Detailed industry (i.e., 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 local workforce indicators. • Job-to-Job Flows (J2J)—Job-to-Job Flows (J2J) is a new set of statistics on worker reallocation in the United States constructed from the LEHD data. The initial release of national data distinguishes hires and separations associated with job change from hires and separations to non-employment. Future releases will be published at more detailed levels of aggregations, and will tabulate the origin and destination job characteristics of workers changing jobs. 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 a host of other applications.

The latest form for Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) expires 2021-01-31 and can be found here.