New Area- and Population-based Geographic Crosswalks for U.S. Counties and Congressional Districts, 1790-2020

Andreas Ferrara, Patrick Testa and Liyang Zhou
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Liyang Zhou: University of Pittsburgh

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: A common problem in applied research involves harmonizing geographic units across time or different levels of aggregation. One approach is to use crosswalks that associate factors located within some origin unit to different reference units based on relative areas. We develop an alternative approach based on relative population, accounting for heterogeneities in urbanization within counties. We construct population-based crosswalks for 1790 through 2020, mapping county-level data across U.S. Censuses as well as from counties to congressional districts. Using official Census data for congressional districts, we show that population-based weights outperform area-based ones in terms of similarity to official data

Keywords: boundary harmonization; geographic crosswalks; spatial population distribution JEL Classification: R12, C18, C59 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-his and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp588.2021.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: New area- and population-based geographic crosswalks for U.S. counties and congressional districts, 1790–2020 (2024)
Working Paper: New Area- and Population-based Geographic Crosswalks for U.S. Counties and Congressional Districts, 1790–2020 (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:588

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