Source
The Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) are published by the LEHD Program at the U.S. Census Bureau. The QWI contain imputed links between individuals and their workplaces, and future versions will contain synthetic replacements for suppressed table cells. Public use data are available at this site.
Downloading the data
No registration is required. The data can be accessed at http://www.vrdc.cornell.edu/qwipu/.
Update schedule
The full historical time series for the QWI are recomputed every quarter based on the most recent information, and released on a flow basis by the U.S. Census Bureau. About two weeks after the last state has been released every quarter, the entire set of files is released on the VirtualRDC. Announcements are made on the front page, and archived announcements can be found under http://www.vrdc.cornell.edu/news/tag/qwipu. Historical versions are available to users – up to four versions through direct web-based download at the same location as the most current version, and others upon request. Each version covers the entire historical time series.
Data structure
Data are organized by state and aggregation-level of the data. The CSV files have a header row with suggested variables names; variable values are documented in the “QWI cheatsheet“.
SSG users logged onto our compute servers will find the most up-to-date data under /ssgprojects/qwipu/data.current, with one subdirectory per state, as SAS and Stata datasets. Additional versions can be found under /ssgprojects/qwipu/data.(RELEASE). For select files, a concatenated version for all states can be found in the us/ subdirectory. For other files, users can consult the program /ssgprojects/qwipu/data.current/example.sas on how to construct different concatenated files (as SAS views). Availability of files is tabulated in
/ssgprojects/qwipu/data.(RELEASE)/dates.sas7bdat and can also be identified on the download page at starting_dates.html.
Citing information about the data
The key reference for the QWI is
John M Abowd, Bryce E Stephens, Lars Vilhuber, Fredrik Andersson, Kevin L McKinney, Marc Roemer, Simon Woodcock (2009): “The LEHD infrastructure files and the creation of the Quarterly Workforce Indicators”, in: Timothy Dunne, J. Bradford Jensen, and Mark J. Roberts (editors),
Producer Dynamics: New Evidence From Micro Data, University of Chicago Press, Pages 149-230. [Link to PDF] [Link to bibliographic information]
Additionally, if you download the data from this site, please acknowledge support by NSF Grant #SES-0922005, and provide us with a copy of any article, thesis, etc. that used the data.
Funding for this site
The maintenance of the download site has been made possible through funding by NSF Grants #0427889, #0339191, #9978093, #0922005, and NIA Grant 5R01AG018854.