The Early County Business Pattern Files: 1946-1974

The County Business Pattern (“CBP”) files contain employment and establishment counts for detailed industry codes covering all counties in the United States. The contribution of this project is to digitize, clean, and prepare the CBP files from 1946-1974. We also apply the methods developed in Eckert, Fort, Schott, and Yang (2020a) to impute missing employment observations in the raw data. We provide three digital data products for public use: (1) the cleaned CBP files for each year, (2) a consolidated panel data set of employment and establishment counts for about 20 industries and all US counties, (3) estimates for suppressed employment counts for each year.