Total Error and Variability Measures for the Quarterly Workforce Indicators and LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics in OnTheMap

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the accuracy and variability of key employment indicators in the U.S. Census Bureau's LEHD program, providing guidelines on their reliability based on job count thresholds and error sources.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive quality assessment of five major employment indicators in the LEHD Quarterly Workforce Indicators and LODES data, addressing error sources and data reliability.

Findings

Indicators are highly accurate for cells with at least 10 jobs.

Cells with 3-9 jobs require caution due to variability.

Cells with 1-2 jobs have high variability but can estimate larger aggregates.

Abstract

We report results from the first comprehensive total quality evaluation of five major indicators in the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI): total flow-employment, beginning-of-quarter employment, full-quarter employment, average monthly earnings of full-quarter employees, and total quarterly payroll. Beginning-of-quarter employment is also the main tabulation variable in the LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) workplace reports as displayed in OnTheMap (OTM), including OnTheMap for Emergency Management. We account for errors due to coverage; record-level non-response; edit and imputation of item missing data; and statistical disclosure limitation. The analysis reveals that the five publication variables under study are estimated very accurately for tabulations involving at least 10 jobs. Tabulations involving three to nine jobs are a transition zone, where cells may be fit for use with caution. Tabulations involving one or two jobs, which are generally suppressed on fitness-for-use criteria in the QWI and synthesized in LODES, have substantial total variability but can still be used to estimate statistics for untabulated aggregates as long as the job count in the aggregate is more than 10.