Implementing Establishment Imputation Procedures for the Administrative Job Frame

The imputation of workers to establishments within firms is a key component of the production of the Job Frame. This paper describes testing and implementation of adapting existing imputation methodologies from LEHD to the W2-based Job Frame. We start by describing the construction of alternative candidate establishment sets for each job within a multi-establishment firm. These alternative sets are based on the varying combination of two existing business frames, the LEHD Employer Characteristics File (ECF) and the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). Furthermore, we produce additional candidate sets that restrict candidate lists to plausible sets based on establishment distance from the worker’s residence and state of employment information from LEHD. We then feed these alternative candidate sets to the existing LEHD U2W imputation model to assign workers to unique establishments. We test for the quality of the imputations by comparing the imputed industry and state of employment for each worker against information from the American Community Survey (ACS). We show that using candidate sets based primarily on LBD or on ECF or restricting candidate establishments by distance produces imputations with remarkably similar quality.