Data Q&A: Public hospitals and schools
When using industry-based labor market data, it is important to understand the data’s sources and limitations. One question we sometimes get from our clients goes like this: “We have a big hospital in our county, and yet your data shows no jobs in the “hospitals” industry. What’s going on?” Similar questions arise for public elementary, secondary, and postsecondary schools.
The basic answer is that in EMSI data, hospitals and schools operated by the state or local government are classified under the “state government” or “local government” categories rather than the categories of “hospitals” or “schools.”
EMSI’s information for hospitals and schools comes from several sources, including the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW; Bureau of Labor Statistics), the Regional Economic Information System (REIS; Bureau of Economic Analysis), and County Business Patterns (CBP; Census Bureau). QCEW reports both private and government employment within “schools” and “hospitals” categories. (Note, however, that all American Indian Tribal Councils’ employment is reported as “local government,” which may affect hospital and school job totals in some areas.) REIS, which covers more types of workers, places all government employees, regardless of the type of establishment where they work, under state and local government categories. CBP is almost entirely private-sector only.
The central problem with reporting hospital and school jobs under their intuitive categories is that we have found QCEW’s state and local government employment numbers difficult to integrate with other sources. Not only does QCEW not cover a significant number of state and local government employees (due to nuances of unemployment insurance regulations), it also has a very high percentage of nondisclosed or “suppressed” figures at the county level. Since we use CBP to estimate nondisclosed figures in QCEW, and CBP excludes almost all government employment, we could not show the majority of QCEW’s county-level state and local government employment anyway. So it makes more sense for us to include only private-sector QCEW under the main industry categories and put state and local government employment, totaled from REIS, in separate categories. (Notice that if you run a staffing pattern on the “local government” industry, you will frequently see large numbers of teachers and nurses.)
So, EMSI follows the BEA’s method of counting public schools and hospitals under state and local government. At some point in the future we would like to resolve this issue, but we would require better source data in order to do it with confidence.
