This paper is a newer version of https://hdl.handle.net/1813/50976Commuting flows and workplace employment data have a wide constituency of users including urban and
regional planners, social science and transportation researchers, and businesses. The U.S. Census Bureau
releases two, national data products that give the magnitude and characteristics of home to work flows. The
American Community Survey (ACS) tabulates households’ responses on employment, workplace, and
commuting behavior. The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program tabulates
administrative records on jobs in the LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES). Design
differences across the datasets lead to divergence in a comparable statistic: county-to-county aggregate
commute flows. To understand differences in the public use data, this study compares ACS and LEHD source
files, using identifying information and probabilistic matching to join person and job records. In our
assessment, we compare commuting statistics for job frames linked on person, employment status, employer,
and workplace and we identify person and job characteristics as well as design features of the data frames that
explain aggregate differences. We find a lower rate of within-county commuting and farther commutes in
LODES. We attribute these greater distances to differences in workplace reporting and to uncertainty of
establishment assignments in LEHD for workers at multi-unit employers. Minor contributing factors include
differences in residence location and ACS workplace edits. The results of this analysis and the data
infrastructure developed will support further work to understand and enhance commuting statistics in both
datasets.This work received support from NSF grant SES-1131848 (NCRN Cornell).Downloads for this item at https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ldi/38/ as of 9/11/2020: 35
