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Construction employment for Pitkin Co, Colo

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davidbecher
Hello, I purchased 2012 IMPLAN data for Pitkin County, Colorado. The industry detail for construction shows the following employment in Pitkin County construction sectors: Construction of new nonresidential commercial and health care structures 142.01 Construction of new nonresidential manufacturing structures 38.96 Construction of other new nonresidential structures 306.00 Construction of new residential permanent site single- and multi-family structures 66.60 Construction of other new residential structures 100.31 Maintenance and repair construction of nonresidential structures 171.91 Maintenance and repair construction of residential structures 3.76 The above data suggests there are 829.56 construction employees in Pitkin County, of which 170.68 employees are involved in residential construction. However, building permit records indicate that most of the construction which occurred in the county in 2012 (and indeed in most/all recent years) was residential, on a valuation basis. Curious if there's an explanation, or if the IMPLAN employment data should be "taken with a grain of salt"? Additionally, Pitkin County is in an unusual situation where many construction firms are based in other counties, but perform much of their work at jobsites in Pitkin County. Would workers for those firms be assigned to Pitkin County on a pro-rated (share of workload) basis, or assigned solely to the county where the firm is based? Thanks.
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    IMPLAN Support
    Hi David, That would be the main reason for your residential employment findings. While the majority of the construction is occurring in Pikin County, CO; the workers are not employed in that county. Nor would those employees be spending the majority of their Labor Income dollars there as well. Although there will be monies spent in Pitkin County from the workers the majority of those labor dollars will be where those workers live. This article discusses how you can modify Labor Income to correctly reflect only Household expenditures for local workers. https://implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=737 As a suggestion, you could perform an MRIO analysis linking Pitkin County and the county where the construction firms reside together. MRIO demonstrates how an impact in your Study Area disperses into other regions and allows you to see how these effects in surrounding area create additional local effects. Here is an article that speaks more to the MRIO method: https://implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=832&Itemid=1605 As regards your question about the derivation and validity of IMPLAN Employment. Our Employment information incorporates two primary federal data sets: QCEW and REA. IMPLAN jobs follow BEA definitions of head counts. As stated above only workers employed in firms in your county will be shown in the data set. This article describes in greater detail how these two primary data sets and the CBP are used in creating IMPLAN data. https://implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=634. If you want to know more about how we estimate the non-disclosures, this article address that aspect of the Employment data development: https://implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=635. Construction Sectors are somewhat unique in that we create our construction Sectors from Census descriptions rather than NAICS codes to assist our users, so that they do not need to construct a building from it's component NAICS based parts and also because it is Sector with high proprietors. This article briefly address some additional information about construction Sector Employment. https://implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=638 In addition, IMPLAN is one of two calculation methodologies that are approved for job impact calculations for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and for the EB-5 program, both of which are job driven federal programs and rely heavily on construction for their impacts. Please let us know if you have any additional questions or concerns. Thanks! --Implan Support Staff
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