The breakdown of employment status by zip code in NYC

NHGIS
1

Hi, I’m new to IPUMS NHGIS and I am interested in the breakdown of labor force employment status (e.g. employed, un employed, not in labor force) by zip code in NYC. In my data query, I’ve specified the level of geographic data to ZCTA, and selected table B23025 (employment status) from 2019 5-year ACS. In the output file, I filter the zip codes from 10001 to 10282 to limit the geographic area to NYC. However, when I added all the counts under ALY3E004 (In labor force: Civilian labor force: Employed), the total is 900,945 and is way off the actual employed population in NYC (should be around 4 million). Are there any reasons that could cause this?

Another question: does NHGIS have access to the restricted sub-county data from ACS to give us the geographic summary data?

Thank you so much in advance!

2

Regarding the employment estimates using ZCTAs, I suspect the primary issue is that the ZCTAs you have selected do not capture all of New York City; the ZIP codes you have specified appear to be for Manhattan only and exclude the other boroughs. There are two other things that may be helpful as you work with ZCTAs:

  1. ZCTAs may not perfectly align with place boundaries (e.g., there may be codes that cross NYC boundaries)

  2. the range of ZCTAs you need to include may not be continuous (e.g., the ZIP code for Mt. Vernon, NY is 10550; however, ZIP codes in Queens begin with 11000)

I am not sure that I understand your second question about the sub-county data exactly, but I am guessing that you are inquiring about the provenance of IPUMS NHGIS data. IPUMS NHGIS is based on summary files released by the Census Bureau; IPUMS does not derive these tables directly from the public use microdata samples (PUMS). Restricted use versions of the PUMS can be accessed via an federal statistical research data center (FSRDC). Please let me know if I have misunderstood your question.