The decennial census is the largest peacetime operation of the U.S. federal government. The Census Bureau hires hundreds of thousands of temporary workers to conduct the decennial census. The magnitude of this temporary workforce influences the national employment situation when enumeration efforts ramp up and when they recede. The impact of decennial census hiring on the headline number of payroll jobs added each month is well established, but previous work has not established how decennial census hiring affects the headline unemployment rate. We link the 2010 Decennial Applicant Personnel and Payroll System data to the 2010 American Community Survey to answer this question. We find that the large hiring surge in May 2010 came mostly from people already employed (40 percent) or from people who were unemployed (33 percent). We estimate that the workers hired for Census 2010 lowered the May 2010 unemployment rate by one-tenth of a percentage point relative to the counterfactual. This one-tenth of a percentage point is within the standard error for the official unemployment rate, and BLS press releases would denote a change in the unemployment rate of 0.1% or less as 'unchanged.' We also estimate that relative to the counterfactual, the more gradual changes in decennial census employment influenced the unemployment rate by less than one-tenth of a percentage point in every other month during 2010.
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The Recent Decline in Employment Dynamics
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-03
In recent years, the rate at which workers and businesses exchange jobs has declined in the United States. Between 1998 and 2010, rates of job creation, job destruction, hiring, and separation declined dramatically, and the rate of job-to-job flows fell by about half. Little is known about the nature and extent of these changes, and even less about their causes and implications. In this paper, we document and attempt to explain the recent decline in employment dynamics. Our empirical work relies on the four leading datasets of quarterly employment dynamics in the United States ' the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD), the Business Employment Dynamics (BED), the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), and the Current Population Survey (CPS). We find that changes in the composition of the labor force and of employers explain relatively little of the decline. Exploiting some identities that relate the different measures to each other, we find that job creation and destruction could explain as much of a third of the decline in hires and separations, while job-to-job flows may explain more of the decline. We end our paper with a discussion of different possible explanations and their relative merits.
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The Consequences of Long Term Unemployment:
Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data*
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-40
It is well known that the long-term unemployed fare worse in the labor market than the short-term unemployed, but less clear why this is so. One potential explanation is that the long-term unemployed are 'bad apples' who had poorer prospects from the outset of their spells (heterogeneity). Another is that their bad outcomes are a consequence of the extended unemployment they have experienced (state dependence). We use Current Population Survey (CPS) data on unemployed individuals linked to wage records for the same people to distinguish between these competing explanations. For each person in our sample, we have wage record data that cover the period from 20 quarters before to 11 quarters after the quarter in which the person is observed in the CPS. This gives us rich information about prior and subsequent work histories not available to previous researchers that we use to control for individual heterogeneity that might be affecting subsequent labor market outcomes. Even with these controls in place, we find that unemployment duration has a strongly negative effect on the likelihood of subsequent employment. This finding is inconsistent with the heterogeneity ('bad apple') explanation for why the long-term unemployed fare worse than the short-term unemployed. We also find that longer unemployment durations are associated with lower subsequent earnings, though this is mainly attributable to the long-term unemployed having a lower likelihood of subsequent employment rather than to their having lower earnings once a job is found.
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A New Measure of Multiple Jobholding in the U.S. Economy
September 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-26
We create a measure of multiple jobholding from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data. This new series shows that 7.8 percent of persons in the U.S. are multiple jobholders, this percentage is pro-cyclical, and has been trending upward during the past twenty years. The data also show that earnings from secondary jobs are, on average, 27.8 percent of a multiple jobholder's total quarterly earnings. Multiple jobholding occurs at all levels of earnings, with both higher- and lower-earnings multiple jobholders earning more than 25 percent of their total earnings from multiple jobs. These new statistics tell us that multiple jobholding is more important in the U.S. economy than we knew.
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The Shifting Job Tenure Distribution
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-12R
There has been a shift in the U.S. job tenure distribution toward longer-duration jobs since 2000. This change is apparent both in the tenure supplements to the Current Population Survey and in matched employer-employee data. A substantial portion of this shift can be accounted for by the ageing of the workforce and the decline in the entry rate of new employer businesses. This shift is accounted for more by declines in the hiring rate, which are concentrated in the labor market downturns associated with the 2001 and 2007-2009 recessions, rather than declines in separation rates. The increase in average real earnings since 2007 is less than what would be predicted by the shift toward longer-tenure jobs because of declines in tenure-held-constant real earnings. Regression estimates of the returns to job tenure provide no evidence that the shift in the job tenure distribution is being driven by better matches between workers and employers.
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HIRES, SEPARATIONS, AND THE JOB TENURE DISTRIBUTION IN ADMINISTRATIVE EARNINGS RECORDS
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-29
Statistics on hires, separations, and job tenure have historically been tabulated from survey data. In recent years, these statistics are increasingly being produced from administrative records. In this paper, we discuss the calculation of hires, separations, and job tenure from quarterly administrative records, and we present these labor market statistics calculated from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program. We pay special attention to a phenomenon that survey data is ill-suited to analyze: single quarter jobs, which we define as jobs in which the hire and separation occur in the same quarter. We explore the trends of hires, separations, tenure, and single quarter jobs in the United States for the years 1998-2010. We discuss issues associated with creating these statistics from quarterly earnings records, and we identify the challenges that remain.
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Estimation of Job-to-Job Flow Rates under Partially Missing Geography
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-29
Integration of data from different regions presents challenges for the calculation of entitylevel longitudinal statistics with a strong geographic component: for example, movements between employers, migration, business dynamics, and health statistics. In this paper, we consider the estimation of worker-level employment statistics when the geographies (in our application, US states) over which such measures are defined are partially missing. We focus on the recent pilot set of job-to-job flow statistics produced by the US Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer- Household Dynamics (LEHD) program, which measure the frequency of worker movements between jobs and into and out of nonemployment. LEHD's coverage of the labor force gradually increases during the 1990s and 2000s because some states have a longer time series than others, so employment transitions involving missing states are only partially or not at all observed. We propose and implement a method for estimating national-level job-to-job flow statistics that involves dropping observed states to recover the relationship between missing states and directly tabulated job-to-job flow rates. Using the estimated relationship between the observable characteristics of the missing states and changes in the employment measures, we provide estimates of the rates of job-to-job, and job-to-nonemployment, job-to-nonemploymentto- job flows were all states uniformly available.
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Complex Survey Questions and the Impact of Enumeration Procedures: Census/American Community Survey Disability Questions
April 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-10
This paper explores challenges relating to the identification of the population with disabilities,focusing on Census Bureau efforts using the 2000 Decennial Census Long-Form (Census 2000) and 2000-2005 American Community Survey (ACS). In particular, the analyses explore the impact of survey methods on responses to the work limitation (i.e., employment disability) question in these two Census products. Building on the research of Stern (2003) and Stern and Brault (2005), we look for further evidence of misreporting of an employment disability by specific sub-populations using the participation in the Supplemental Security Income program as an exogenous employment disability status indicator along with a subset of ACS disability questions. We expand upon these earlier studies by examining both false-positive and falsenegative reports of employment disability by implementing logit estimations to examine the role of respondent/enumerator error on the accuracy of the employment disability response. In this manner, we enhance our understanding of Census 2000 and ACS responses to employment disability questions through an exploration of the role of enumeration procedures in two types of misclassifications, as well as by evaluating existing data and estimates to uncover characteristics that might make an individual more likely to misreport an employment disability.
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Incorporating Administrative Data in Survey Weights for the Basic Monthly Current Population Survey
January 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-02
Response rates to the Current Population Survey (CPS) have declined over time, raising the potential for nonresponse bias in key population statistics. A potential solution is to leverage administrative data from government agencies and third-party data providers when constructing survey weights. In this paper, we take two approaches. First, we use administrative data to build a non-parametric nonresponse adjustment step while leaving the calibration to population estimates unchanged. Second, we use administratively linked data in the calibration process, matching income data from the Internal Return Service and state agencies, demographic data from the Social Security Administration and the decennial census, and industry data from the Census Bureau's Business Register to both responding and nonresponding households. We use the matched data in the household nonresponse adjustment of the CPS weighting algorithm, which changes the weights of respondents to account for differential nonresponse rates among subpopulations.
After running the experimental weighting algorithm, we compare estimates of the unemployment rate and labor force participation rate between the experimental weights and the production weights. Before March 2020, estimates of the labor force participation rates using the experimental weights are 0.2 percentage points higher than the original estimates, with minimal effect on unemployment rate. After March 2020, the new labor force participation rates are similar, but the unemployment rate is about 0.2 percentage points higher in some months during the height of COVID-related interviewing restrictions. These results are suggestive that if there is any nonresponse bias present in the CPS, the magnitude is comparable to the typical margin of error of the unemployment rate estimate. Additionally, the results are overall similar across demographic groups and states, as well as using alternative weighting methodology. Finally, we discuss how our estimates compare to those from earlier papers that calculate estimates of bias in key CPS labor force statistics.
This paper is for research purposes only. No changes to production are being implemented at this time.
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The United States Labor Market: Status Quo or A New Normal?
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-28
The recession of 2007-09 witnessed high rates of unemployment that have been slow to recede. This has led many to conclude that structural changes have occurred in the labor market and that the economy will not return to the low rates of unemployment that prevailed in the recent past. Is this true? The question is important because central banks may be able to reduce unemployment that is cyclic in nature, but not that which is structural. An analysis of labor market data suggests that there are no structural changes that can explain movements in unemployment rates over recent years. Neither industrial nor demographic shifts nor a mismatch of skills with job vacancies is behind the increased rates of unemployment. Although mismatch increased during the recession, it retreated at the same rate. The patterns observed are consistent with unemployment being caused by cyclic phenomena that are more pronounced during the current recession than in prior recessions.
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The Impact of Household Surveys on 2020 Census Self-Response
July 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-24
Households who were sampled in 2019 for the American Community Survey (ACS) had lower self-response rates to the 2020 Census. The magnitude varied from -1.5 percentage point for household sampled in January 2019 to -15.1 percent point for households sampled in December 2019. Similar effects are found for the Current Population Survey (CPS) as well.
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