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I am trying to download month-county level unemployment data from the bls's LAU, but I can't find data extending earlier than the "latest 14 months." This data set is exactly what I want EXCEPT that it does not extend far enough into the past. If that data extended to at least 2007, I would be done. I know the data is available, because I can download it county by county from the BLS multi-screen-data-search tool.

Where can I download the archives of monthly-county level LAU data?

gannawag
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If you are hoping to use not seasonally adjusted monthly predictions of estimated county unemployment rates, I would suggest keeping in mind some of the changes to county borders that have taken place since 2007. For instance, there has been A LOT of changes to "county" borders in Alaska since 2007; Colorado, has had a major county border change; and Virginia has had one county wholly incorporate another county.

That being said, this directory has what you are looking for. Be sure to read all of the smaller sized files that fully explain the meaning of the data.

Kotebiya
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  • Thanks for the heads up - I didn't realize the borders have changed so much. I looked at that directory previously, but, in my haste, I missed that I needed to combine two of the data sets to get the county name and the data for each period. For future reference, the actual values for each county-month are in http://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/la/la.data.64.County and the cross walk to get the county names are in http://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/la/la.series .Thanks again! – gannawag Jul 18 '15 at 15:09