What's New — October 2001

Site of the Month: County Business Patterns

http://www.census.gov/epcd/cbp/view/cbpview.html

Sure, you'll say, you know County Business Patterns as well as you know your own spreadsheets. Well, get ready for a much more powerful and easy to use CBP web experience. As we've mentioned before, County Business Patterns is one of the first data series to use the new North American Industry Classification System. The site now has data for both 1998 and 1999 by NAICS category.

A new interface lets you easily drill down through the various NAICS classification levels, where you'll find data on numbers of firms, employees, average payroll, and a classification of establishments by number of employees. So far, old hat. But the CBP site has two new twists. First, you can now select data for metropolitan areas, sparing you the tedium of separately downloading data county by county. (You can also select data by states or counties). Next the good part: click on the "compare" button on the screen, and the CBP web page shows you the comparable data for other metropolitan areas in the nation or other counties in the same state.

Want to zoom in even closer than counties or metro areas? You can view data on employment, payroll and numbers of businesses by size class at the zip code level (with comparisons to other nearby zip codes). 
http://tier2.census.gov/cgi-win/zbp_naics/sectors.exe

Given that many data users spend hours to accumulate the data to make relatively simple cross-sectional comparisons and rankings, this will be a huge time-saver. We hope other sites will provide this kind of utility in the months to come. Also, be aware there appear to still be some bugs in the CBP data: for example, whenever Census suppressed the exact total number of employees in a particular industry and county, it coded them has having "0 to 19" employees, even when the firm size distribution data indicated many firms with 50 to 99 or even more
employees. We expect Census will fix this glitch soon. But don't wait to try out this great new site.

New Links Added

October's new links focus on construction, real estate and housing. Two private organizations, the Co-Star Group and the National Association of Realtors provide market information and housing price data. The Census Bureau has a range of data series that address construction activity, and the 2000 Census provides up to date housing counts for a variety of geographies.

CoStar Group
Vacancy rates, new construction, net absorption, and rental rates for office (central business district, suburban) and industrial (breakout for flex) real estate, for 38 major metro areas. Published quarterly. 
http://www.costargroup.com/trends/

National Association of Realtors
Index of median housing prices, for 140 metro areas, issued quarterly.
http://www.onerealtorplace.com/Research.nsf/Pages/MetroPrice?OpenDocument

Sales of existing homes by state, issued quarterly; index of median housing
prices, for 140 metro areas, issued quarterly.
http://www.onerealtorplace.com/Research.nsf/Pages/EHSPage?OpenDocument

Census Bureau
Annual data, by type of nonresidential buildings, by state. $$
http://www.census.gov/ftp/pub/const/www/c30index.html

Annual data on number of new manufactured homes placed, average sales price, by size of home, by state.
http://www.census.gov/const/www/mhsindex.html

Housing counts for states, counties, places, and other areas.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/hunits/index.html

High Technology Rankings

AeA, as the American Electronics Association now likes to be known, as released its annual revision of its cyber-rankings: Cyber-states and Cyber-Cities. These contain valuable data on employment in computers, electronics, instruments, software and telecommunication services for states and metropolitan areas.

American Electronics Association 
Annual press release by metro area 
http://www.aeanet.org/aeanet/AEACommon/displaystartlink.asp?file=/aeanet/PressRoom/statmk0000_cybercities_map2.htm

Annual press release by state
http://www.aeanet.org/aeanet/AEACommon/displaystartlink.asp?file=/aeanet/PressRoom/statmk_cyberstates2001_PRmap.htm

A slightly different view of what constitutes high technology comes from Ann Markusen and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota. Defining high tech as those industries with above average fractions of scientists and engineers in their workforces nationally, they estimate the number of high tech jobs in US metro areas. A pdf file with their findings is available at: 
http://www.hhh.umn.edu/gpo/degrees/murp/htmetros.pdf

The Milken Institute, which last year ranked metropolitan areas on a series of New Economy Indicators, has recently released a similar report for states.
http://www.milkeninstitute.org/releases/ecoindex.html

Finally, the US Conference of Mayors and the National Association of Counties have released estimates of high technology industry output in states and metropolitan areas. Industry output was estimated by Standard & Poors/DRI.
http://www.usmayors.org/citiesdrivetheeconomy/index2.html

Science and Technology Indicators

Hand in hand with high technology industries are indicators of scientific and technological activity. You'll find a number of good sources of this information.

The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative analyzes historic data and prepares five-year projection federal R&D funding levels, by state, under various scenarios. These are updated annually, the latest August 2000 version is at:
http://www.mtpc.org/fedfund/analyses.htm

The Technology Administration of the US Department of Commerce compiles its own indicators of science and technology activity by state. A pdf file with the latest report, from last year, is at:
http://www.ta.doc.gov/Reports/TechPolicy/tapub.pdf

The Science and Technology Policy Institute of RAND Corporation has developed a very detailed database of federally funded research activities. The data covers federal R&D units, federal R&D grants, and other federal R&D activities. While the database is available on a subscription basis, state-by-state reports (in pdf format) are available on the web at:
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1194/