County Coding in the Annual Survey of Manufactures of the 1950s

Randy Becker

CES Technical Notes Series from Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau

Abstract: A recent examination of newly recovered files containing establishment-level data from the 1953, 1955, and 1956 Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) revealed an unfamiliar and undocumented county coding system, unlike the ones that came to be used (and documented) in the 1960s and beyond. In particular, I discovered that these early county codes were only ever comprised of three nondecreasing digits, except for some counties in the state of Texas. After noting that counties appear to have been assigned codes in within-state alphabetical order, using a list of county (and county equivalents) in existence at the time, and by matching the 1956 ASM establishments to their 1963 Census of Manufactures data, I was able to derive and validate the underlying coding scheme, including for the anomalous states of Texas and Virginia. This paper describes my methodology and presents a spreadsheet of 3,104 counties that relates the 1950s county codes, county name, and the county codes used in the Economic Censuses of the 1960s. The significance of a code with nondescreasing digits is also discussed. In particular, such a code was employed to enhance error detection – specifically, the transposition of digits during key punching.

Keywords: ASM; CMF (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/tn/CES-TN-2009-01.pdf Abstract (application/pdf)
https://www.census.gov/about/adrm/ced/apply-for-access.html?CES-TN-2009-01 Confidential main document (application/pdf)
Researchers need to have obtained appropriate permissions.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:tnotes:09-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CES Technical Notes Series from Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Danielle H. Sandler ().