The Longitudinal Business Database

This paper describes recent efforts at CES to create a new longitudinal research dataset: the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). The LBD is a major improvement over existing longitudinal establishment datasets. Unlike the LRD, which covers only manufacturing, the LBD covers nearly all the non-farm private economy, as well as some public sector activities. Also, research using the LRD found problems with broken longitudinal linkages that lead to spurious establishment births and deaths (Dunne 1992). We supplemented the longitudinal numeric identifiers assigned by the Census Bureau with name and address matching to repair broken linkages