PolicyMap attending the 2013 LED Partnership Workshop

This week, PolicyMap is headed to a Census workshop in Suitland, Maryland, on an exciting new dataset we plan to add to our platform this summer. It’s called Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD). This new dataset from the Census relies on unemployment insurance information collected by states to provide data on jobs. LEHD offers counts of the number of jobs based on where people work and where they live, and provides a glimpse into the workforce demographics of a location by breaking out the number of jobs by age, race, ethnicity, earnings, and industry.

We already offer industry-specific job data at the ZIP code level from the Census’s County Business Patterns program, and county level data on wages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (for more click here). But adding LEHD to the platform will allow us to show employment numbers at much smaller geographies, like Census tracts, and, for the first time, to look at the demographic characteristics of local workforces. LEHD’s detailed workforce demographics data will be available for block groups, tracts, ZIP codes, counties, cities, and metropolitan areas throughout the country.

Additionally, the unique ability of this dataset to link where people live with where they work will allow us to offer indicators such as distance traveled to work, and the percent of people that live and work in the same area.

Keep an eye out for LEHD coming later this summer. And if you have other datasets you’d like to see on PolicyMap let us know!