The Crosswalk Project will try to develop a close-to-universal system of crosswalks between different occupational, industrial and geographic levels at which various datasets are constructed. The eventual aim to construct a dynamically evolving map between these systems that will aid researchers in easily matching datasets.
- Geography: A dynamic map that tracks places at at least the county level, to allow users to map observations across datasets at each point in time.
- Industry: A dynamic map between SIC87 to NAICSxx, xx = 1997,2002,2007,2012,2017 and the upcoming 2022 when released to start with, to be expanded to include NACE Rev 2 and newer as well as SITC. Some of these already exist, but in a deeply fragmented state.
- Occupation: A dynamic map between OCCxx codes available in IPUMS Census and CPS data and the BLS SOC codes to start with.
A large number of crosswalks across industries, occupations and geographies exist, but these are largely fragmented and often mutually inconsistent. Further, some datasets actually contain somewhat serious errors, and it is important to account for these in the construction of these crosswalks. The key sources for this project will be
- David Dorn's website, which hosts a number of crosswalks across these dimensions.
- Raw data from the County Business Practices and elsewhere.