Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program
Detailed information on LEHD program
The LEHD Program combines data from state and federal sources to create a longitudinal linked employer-employee dataset. As LEHD data is drawn from quarterly records covering 90% of all wage and salary jobs in 48 participating states, LEHD datasets are the most comprehensive source of information on wages and employment available. LEHD data has been used for a variety of purposes, including analysis of commuting patterns, transportation planning, and study of turnover, pensions, low-wage work, and productivity.
Data on individual wages and employment are drawn from state unemployment wage records (UI) and supplemented with demographic information (e.g., sex, race, birth date, place of residence, and citizenship) from Census administrative records (Person Characteristics File and the Composite Person Records.) Information on employers (e.g., industry, employment, revenues) is drawn from the ES-202/ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, collected jointly by state Departments of Employment Security and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. LEHD researchers then use statistical matching techniques to associate employees with their place of work and to make identifiers longitudinally consistent.
The matched data are used to produce the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) and an online web-tool called On-the-Map. The QWI include data on firms’ total employment, firms’ change in employment, average monthly earnings for all workers in a firm, average monthly earnings for new hires, characteristics of firms, and characteristics of employees.
In the process of creating the QWI, the LEHD program creates a set of infrastructure files, including: the Employer Characteristics File (ECF), the Employment History Files (ECF), the Individual Characteristics File (ICF), and the Unit-to-Worker Impute files (UWI). These files contain data not necessarily included in the QWI, such as citizenship and education information.
Due to the unique way that the LEHD infrastructure files are constructed, they can be easily linked to many other files available through Census. To facilitate this, Census also creates two linking files, the Business Register Bridge (BRB) and Geocoded Address List (GAL). The BRB is a crosswalk linking LEHD to Economic Census data sets, and the GAL is useful for linking Census data and LEHD data to external data sets.
