Layout of ea_pop_long_lat97 file

(Note: there is a SAS version of the file and an ascii version, with different layouts)

Aug 1, 2012

Description of Supplementary Files for “An Alternative Theory of the Plant Size Distribution, with Geography and Intra- and International Trade”

by

Thomas J. Holmes (University of Minnesota, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and NBER)

and

John J. Stevens (Board of Governors of Federal Reserve System)

Note: The statistics reported in this file are all derived from public Census data

Description of SAS File (ea_pop_long_lat97.sas7bdat)

The file contains Economic Area (EA) Level information for the 177 EAs including population and geographic coordinates. We use the 2004 definition EA definition. See 2004 definition, see Johnson and Kort (2004), as cited in the paper. The EAs are aggregates of counties.

Variable	Description
ea	Economic Area code (ea) used by the BEA, going from 1 to 179
ea_index	A code we use for our project. We delete Alaska and Hawaii, leaving us with 177 EAs. We number the remaining EAs from 1 to 177
eatext	The text corresponding to the given ea
lat	The population weighted latitude. We use the long and lat for each county as given in the 2000 census. We then take the weighted average of these, using 1997 population estimates as weight.
long	See above.
pop97	An estimate of ea level population for 1997. The source is the geo reference file in the 1997 Economic Census. This file provides county level population estimates for 1997. We aggregate these up to the ea level.

Description of ASCII File (ea_pop_long_lat97.asc)

This is just like above, except in ASCII format for reading into Gauss. In particular, there is no header row there four columns of data, where the column are the following:

Column	Variable from Above
1	eaindex
2	ea
3	pop97
4	long
5	lat