What's New - July 2004
STAT-SCAN: The EconData.Net Newsletter
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This month's site of the month is the EEO 2000 Data Tool, which despite its somewhat artless name, is a powerful, versatile means for analyzing the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of occupational categories in local labor markets.
For those of you not in a human resources department, EEO is "Equal Employment Opportunity," and the tool's title reflects its intended purpose. The EEO 2000 Data Tool is based on a special Census 2000 tabulation collectively sponsored by four federal agencies--the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Justice, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Department of Labor--to provide an external benchmark for comparing the race, ethnicity, and sex composition of an organization's internal workforce, and the analogous external labor market, within a specified geography and job category.
While the EEO Data Tool may have been designed for benchmarking purposes, it provides analysts with a ready means for assessing the occupational, educational, and demographic characteristics of local labor markets in some detail. You can use the site to drill down to the county level, as well as to Census "places" (usually cities) with a population of 50,000 or more. For much of the data, you have the opportunity to view tabulations either on a place of residence or place of work basis--a rare instance in which the data collectors haven't already chosen one or the other for you.
The site uses a clunky, but functional, menu interface--you choose the type
of table (from five types of occupational classification, two types of educational attainment
categories, data by place of residence or work), then the level of geography
(nation, state, MSA, county, place), and finally the occupational and racial/ethnic
categories. The application then generates an on-line
table of results, and gives you the opportunity to download a .csv file you can
open with your spreadsheet of choice. The site
has a number of quirks: age brackets don't correspond the usual Census
convention and for a number of tables you cannot ask for data by state or metro
area (though you can have the tool sum data across counties). All in all though, these are minor quibbles. If
you want a new and interesting take on the human faces of your local labor market,
visit this site today:
http://www.census.gov/eeo2000/index.html
Readers also had some great advice to BEA in how to develop this series. Suggestions included constructing a historical series (ideally going back to 1969) to allow time series analysis, as with other BEA data, and specific comments about the level of industrial detail to be included. BEA staff tell us they very much appreciate receiving the letters--this is the most successful effort to generate letters of support for a new data series that they've witnessed.
We'll stay on top of this issue, and report back
to you in a future issue of Stat-Scan on BEA's ability to obtain the necessary resources to
create a GMP series. It's not too late to share your views. You can send your
comments on the utility of a Gross Metropolitan Product series to john.kort@bea.gov--and
please copy us at comments@econdata.net.
If you're trying to get a handle on the flow of commuter traffic in a
regional economy, the Census provides an excellent source of information.
Based on the Census 2000 long form, the Census Bureau prepares an extensive
tabulation of the flows of workers among counties in the U. S. You can
approach these tabulations in either of two ways, by place of residence or by
place of work. The place of residence tables show the workplace county of
all of the residents of each county; the place of work tables show the
reverse. You can download files, listed by state, in either Excel or plain
text format, from:
http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/commuting.html
If you want to get a quick overview of commuter flows to and from the central
counties of the nation's metropolitan areas, you should visit a website
developed by USA Today to summarize this information. (Keep in mind that
the relative size of the central county in a metropolitan area varies
dramatically from place to place).
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2003-03-06-commuting-alpha.htm
Remember the "Technology Boom" of the late 1990s? A new
report by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco compares the economic
performance and industrial composition of a select group of the nation's
technology centers over the five year period from 1995 to 2000. The
research focuses on ten metropolitan areas with high concentrations of
information technology employment--Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Los
Angeles, Portland, San Francisco Bay, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Mary
Daly and Robert Valetta, researchers with the San Francisco Fed, also compare and
contrast research and development spending by metropolitan area, patent levels
and exports, to characterize regional differences in high tech industry
bases. You'll find their article in the Bank's Economic Review a
fascinating retrospective on the metropolitan dimension of the tech boom.
It's available in pdf format at:
www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/review/2004/er1-18bk.pdf
Each month, we bring you a summary of new links added to the EconData.Net
website. Our new links feature is taking the rest of the summer off (and
will return, refreshed and revived in September). In its place,
we'd like to extend an invitation to our readers to forward their suggestions
for new or improved data sites that we should include in our newsletter.
Keep in mind our editorial standards--we focus solely on websites with state and
substate socioeconomic data and generally list only sites that are national in
scope. Send your suggestions to:
comments@econdata.net