IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32206.html

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

Author

Listed:
  • Andreas Ferrara
  • Patrick A. Testa
  • Liyang Zhou

Abstract

In applied historical research, geographic units often differ in level of aggregation across datasets. One solution is to use crosswalks that associate factors located within one geographic unit to another, based on their relative areas. We develop an alternative approach based on relative populations, which accounts for heterogeneities in urbanization within counties. We construct population-based crosswalks for 1790 through 2020, which map 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Andreas Ferrara & Patrick A. Testa & Liyang Zhou, 2024. "New Area- and Population-based Geographic Crosswalks for U.S. Counties and Congressional Districts, 1790–2020," NBER Working Papers 32206, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32206
    Note: DAE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32206.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Eric C. Edwards & Walter N. Thurman, 2022. "The Economics of Climatic Adaptation: Agricultural Drainage in the United States," NBER Chapters, in: American Agriculture, Water Resources, and Climate Change, pages 29-51, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Taylor, Alexander N., 2025. "Monumental effects: Confederate monuments in the Post-Reconstruction South," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 95(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • N01 - Economic History - - General - - - Development of the Discipline: Historiographical; Sources and Methods
    • N9 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History
    • R12 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32206. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.