Supplementing state employment records with demographic data

Administrative records maintained by state governments to administer unemployment insurance (UI) programs provide a valuable resource for economic and policy research. These records contain rich longitudinal, worker-level information but lack data on demographic characteristics of workers, including sex, age, and racial and ethnic identity. This article describes the development of a new state-level data resource based on UI data that links employment records to demographic identifiers compiled from other state agency records. We describe the assembly process and show how the resulting data compare to American Community Survey (ACS) estimates. We are able to replicate the overall population of workers to between 1 percent and 4 percent of the ACS population count. Relative to ACS data, these merged administrative data capture more workers with annual earnings below $10,000 and fewer workers with earnings above $10,000. Our method of augmenting employment records with demographic indicators yields a workforce composition with similar age, gender, and ethnoracial (race/ethnicity) characteristics as observed in U.S.