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Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll (ASPEP) 1992-2016

Name: Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll (ASPEP) 1992-2016
Published: 2018-02-04
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Jacob Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania

Version: View help for Version V1

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
aspep_local.zip	application/zip	5.4 MB	02/04/2018 05:25:PM
aspep_state.zip	application/zip	3 MB	02/04/2018 05:23:PM
aspep_state_and_local.zip	application/zip	5.7 MB	02/04/2018 05:24:PM

Project Citation:

Kaplan, Jacob. Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll (ASPEP) 1992-2016. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2018-02-04. https://doi.org/10.3886/E101399V1

Project Description

Summary: The Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll (ASPEP) is a Census data set with information about public (local, state, and federal government) employees, This data includes the total number of employees (broken between full-time and part-time), their total pay, and the total number of hours part-time workers worked. This is broken by job categories such as Hospital, Public Welfare, Firefighters, and Police.

There are three types of data for each year: Local, State, State and Local. Local includes only local government employees, State includes only state employees, and State and Local combines the two. When the data is downloaded from the Census (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/apes/data/tables.html), each year is an individual file. The data here offers each year individually (cleaned and raw) as well as a file that combines all the years for each type.

Data is available for years 1992-1995 and 1997-2016. 1996 data is not available. The State data also does not include years 1994-1995. Local, and State and Local do not include 1992. All of the code for downloading and cleaning the data is available on GitHub here. https://github.com/jacobkap/aspep

The zip files available to download contain the raw data, the clean data, and combined data set (all years combined into one file) and a codebook for that combined data set.

The raw data is the file downloaded from the Census website with no changes. The clean data changes the column names, state names, and job categories to be consistent over the years. The change in state names is from the full name to the state abbreviation.

Details about the ASPEP are here. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/apes/about.html.

Important info about samples within the data:
"There was no Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll for 1996. The base reporting period for measuring employment and payrolls was changed from October to March. This change became effective with the 1997 Census of Governments. A census is conducted every five years (years ending in ‘2’ and ‘7’). A sample of state and local governments is used to collect data in the intervening years. A new sample is selected every five years (years ending in ‘4’ and ‘9’)."

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: ASPEP; public employees; payroll; government pay; government employees

Geographic Coverage: Local, State, and Federal Government

Time Period(s): 1992 – 2016

Universe: Public employees in the United States.

Methodology

Data Source: "There was no Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll for 1996. The base reporting period for measuring employment and payrolls was changed from October to March. This change became effective with the 1997 Census of Governments. A census is conducted every five years (years ending in ‘2’ and ‘7’). A sample of state and local governments is used to collect data in the intervening years. A new sample is selected every five years (years ending in ‘4’ and ‘9’)."

https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/apes/about.html

Unit(s) of Observation: Governments

Geographic Unit: State

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