The County Business Patterns data published by the US Census Bureau track employment by county and industry from 1946 to the present. Two features of the data limit their usefulness to researchers in practice: (1) employment for the majority of county-industry cells is suppressed to protect...

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...