Functions for downloading BLS flat files into R
BLSloadR is a packages designed to streamline access to the time series database downloads from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, made available at https://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/. It is focused on accessing series that are frequently used by states to get state-level estimates, but includes the load_bls_dataset() and bls_overview() functions to provide generalized access to the other databases at this website within an R environment.
The primary functions in this package all begin with get_ and are listed below:
-get_ces() - This accesses data from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program at the state and metropolitan area levels. This provides employer-based estimates of employment, wages, and hours worked. This is the “SM” database.
-get_national_ces() - This accesses national data from the CES program at the national level, which does not include state-level breakouts. This is the “CE” database.
-get_laus() - This accesses data from the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) program at a regional, state, and several sub-state levels. This is a localized version of the Current Population Survey (CPS) which is used to drive household-based estiamtes of employment and unemployment. This is the “LA” database. Note that because of the volume of data here, there are several different geographies that may be specified to pull the appropriate data file from BLS.
-get_oews() - This access the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) data. This data provides survey-based estimates of employmen and wages by occupation at state and sub-state levels. This is the “OE” database. Note that only current-year data is available for OEWS in this database, as it is not built as a time series.
-get_salt() - This data is not actually loated within the time.series folder, but instead is sourced from https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm. These Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization for States are 12-month averages built from CPS data which provide more expansive or restrictive definitions of unemployment to measure the labor force, known as U1 through U6. This function also includes the optional geometry argument. If set to TRUE, this will use tigris::states() and tigris::shift_geometry() to provide state polygons for convenient mapping of the output.
These optional helper functions can aid the user of this package by providing ways to summarize and explore all the time.series databases. These functions are a bit different than the specific functions above, as they implement a general way to merge and import BLS time.series databases, but do not manually specify the data, series, and lookup files to be joined. As such, they return a bls_data_collection object which includes the joined data as well as diagnostic results including dropped columns, unexpected join results, and other tools to help review the data before use. Further, when multiple data or series files are present, the user is prompted to choose one, so these tools are not suitable for a typical piped script.
bls_overview() - this function utilizes the standard structure of the time.series databases, which has a simple text file explaining the database structure that always follows the structure id.txt where id is the two-character database identification code.
load_bls_dataset() - this function attempts to read and join all the relevant files in a BLS database, and will sometimes prompt the user for additional input. For example, many databases have multiple data files available (such as “AllItems” and “Current”) and may have old series files as well (to manage historical coding changes). Because these joins are performed automatically, the object returned by this function is a more robust diagnostic object included the joined data table as well as information about the joins. Use Caution! BLS data structures are not always consistent. There may be anomalies in the structure of individual databases, such as missing column headers, that will degrade the ability of this function to read the data.
