Paul,

It depends on how many addresses that you want to look up.   You can 
manually look up the block and tract info for addresses at 
factfinder.census.gov.   If you have a few more addresses than you would 
want to do by hand, it is pretty easy to write a program that would 
scrape the block and tract info off the factfinder site.   If you have 
to do a say 50k addresses or more, then you have a bigger problem for 
which there are many solutions none of which are going to be super easy 
to implement given the time, background, and budget that your student 
has available.

Best,

Jeff

On 09/28/2009 02:01 PM, Paul Gronke wrote:
> Colleagues
>
> I have a senior writing a thesis who would like to track changing 
> patterns of campaign donations.  He's interested in replicating and 
> extending Michael Malbin's work on how patterns of donations have 
> changed over the past few cycles.
>
> I would like him to attach Census demographic information to the FEC 
> campaign donations dataset (actually, he's downloaded these from open 
> secrets).
>
> I am not familiar with how you attach a Census tract or block 
> identifier to an address, and if this can be done in a relatively 
> straightforward (and not overly expensive) way.  The student is fairly 
> adept with Stata but not tremendously so.  This is something I'm not 
> averse to learning myself, but I am hoping to find an off the shelf 
> solution, or perhaps someone that has already done with with the 2008, 
> 2004, and 2000 files and might be willing to share a dataset.
>
> Thank you
> Paul G.
>
> ---
> Paul Gronke               Ph: 503-517-7393
> Professor                    Fax:
> Reed College
> 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd.
> Portland OR 97202
> http://www.reed.edu/~gronkep
>
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-- 
Jeffrey B. Lewis, Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
University of California Los Angeles
Los Angeles CA 90095
t: 310.206.5295  f: 310.825.0778
w: http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/lewis

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