Does anyone have experience merging with County Business Patterns data from the Census?

Questions & Help
1

Does anyone have experience merging with County Business Patterns data from the Census? I am trying to merge with ZIP-code Tabulation areas, and around 17 percent of visits go to stores in 3-digit NAICS codes that are not in the 2017 CBP for that particular ZIP-code. Is that normal as new businesses opened between 2017 and 2020?

2

Could also be classification error. Neither cbp nor these data are likely to be 100%accurate

3

@Miklos_Koren_CEU I’m not familiar with county business patterns but you should be able to merge using the county FIPS number which corresponds to the first 5 digits of the census block group id. Does that make sense? I can provide you a list of all the county FIPS if you don’t have them.

4

Thanks, I will try the match at the county level. CBP is mainly county-level, but they have a ZIP-code level product too.

5

@Miklos_Koren_CEU where are the 3-digit naics code data coming from? everything from SafeGraph should have 6 digit naics codes.

6

Oh, I aggregated up to 3 just to be on the safe side re: misclassification. But I can compute it for 6-digit, too.