Economic Analysis of Effects of Business Cycles on the Economy of Cities: A Procedure to Impute Quarterly Estimates of Personal Income in Counties Contained in Multi-County Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs)

摘要

This paper suggests that analytical problems arising from the limitations of annual income data can be partially offset by creating a county data series with imputed quarterly fluctuations. An approach to generating a quarterly county personal income series by adjusting each of the components of county income by means of the Bassie procedure and summing these components to obtain county personal income in a quarter is described. However, limitations to the procedure are highlighted; for example, there are limitationson analyses that can be performed to compare the timing of local cycles with those in other geographic aggregates and on analyses aimed at identifying the stabilizing effect of the different components of income. Eight steps in the imputation procedure (adjusting annual county income data to impute quarterly fluctuations) are described: (1) adjust wage, salary, and proprietors' income by industry; (2) aggregate income; (3) adjust contributions for social insurance; (4) compute place of work / place of residence adjustment; (5) adjust dividends, interest, and rent; (6) adjust transfer payments; (7) adjust population; and (8) compute derived quarterly county income estimates. One table and four references are included.