This paper seeks to provide new insight into how school and post school training investments are linked to employer workplace practices and outcomes using a unique nationally representative survey of establishments in the U.S., the Educational Quality of the Workforce National Employers Survey (EQW-NES). We go beyond simply measuring the incidence of formal or informal training to examine the determinants of the types employers invest in, the relationship between formal school and employer provided training, who is receiving training, the links between investments in physical and human capital, and the impact that human capital investments have on the productivity of establishments. We find that the smallest employers are much less likely to provide formal training programs than employers from larger establishments. Regardless of size, those employers who have adapted some of the practices associated with what have been called "high performance work systems" are more likely to have formal training programs. Employers who have made large investments in physical capital or who have hired workers with higher average education are also more likely to invest in formal training programs and to train a higher proportion of their workers, especially in the manufacturing sector. There are significant and positive effects on establishment productivity associated with investments in human capital. Those employers who hire better educated workers have appreciably higher productivity. The impact of employer provided training differs according to the nature, timing, and location of the employer investments.
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Errors in Survey Reporting and Imputation and Their Effects on Estimates of Food Stamp Program Participation
April 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-14
Benefit receipt in major household surveys is often underreported. This misreporting leads to biased estimates of the economic circumstances of disadvantaged populations, program takeup, and the distributional effects of government programs, and other program effects. We use administrative data on Food Stamp Program (FSP) participation matched to American Community Survey (ACS) and Current Population Survey (CPS) household data. We show that nearly thirty-five percent of true recipient households do not report receipt in the ACS and fifty percent do not report receipt in the CPS. Misreporting, both false negatives and false positives, varies with individual characteristics, leading to complicated biases in FSP analyses. We then directly examine the determinants of program receipt using our combined administrative and survey data. The combined data allow us to examine accurate participation using individual characteristics missing in administrative data. Our results differ from conventional estimates using only survey data, as such estimates understate participation by single parents, non-whites, low income households, and other groups. To evaluate the use of Census Bureau imputed ACS and CPS data, we also examine whether our estimates using survey data alone are closer to those using the accurate combined data when imputed survey observations are excluded. Interestingly, excluding the imputed observations leads to worse ACS estimates, but has less effect on the CPS estimates.
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Cross Sectional Variation In Toxic Waste Releases From The U.S. Chemical Industry
August 1994
Working Paper Number:
CES-94-08
This paper measures and examines the 1987 cross sectional variation in toxic releases from the U.S. chemical industry. The analysis is based on a unique plant level data set of over 2,100 plants, combining EPA toxic release data with Census Bureau data on economic activity. The main results are that intra-industry variation in toxic releases are as great as, or greater, than inter-industry variation, and that plant, firm, and regulatory characteristics are important factors in explaining observed variation in toxic releases. Even after controlling for primary product and plant characteristics, there are some firms that generate significantly lower toxic waste due to managerial ability and/or technology differences.
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Access Methods for United States Microdata
August 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-25
Beyond the traditional methods of tabulations and public-use microdata samples, statistical agencies have developed four key alternatives for providing non-government researchers with access to confidential microdata to improve statistical modeling. The first, licensing, allows qualified researchers access to confidential microdata at their own facilities, provided certain security requirements are met. The second, statistical data enclaves, offer qualified researchers restricted access to confidential economic and demographic data at specific agency-controlled locations. Third, statistical agencies can offer remote access, through a computer interface, to the confidential data under automated or manual controls. Fourth, synthetic data developed from the original data but retaining the correlations in the original data have the potential for allowing a wide range of analyses.
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Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility
July 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-38
We show that intergenerational mobility changed rapidly by race and class in recent decades and use these trends to study the causal mechanisms underlying changes in economic mobility. For white children in the U.S. born between 1978 and 1992, earnings increased for children from high-income families but decreased for children from low-income families, increasing earnings gaps by parental income ('class') by 30%. Earnings increased for Black children at all parental income levels, reducing white- Black earnings gaps for children from low-income families by 30%. Class gaps grew and race gaps shrank similarly for non-monetary outcomes such as educational attainment, standardized test scores, and mortality rates. Using a quasi-experimental design, we show that the divergent trends in economic mobility were caused by differential changes in childhood environments, as proxied by parental employment rates, within local communities defined by race, class, and childhood county. Outcomes improve across birth cohorts for children who grow up in communities with increasing parental employment rates, with larger effects for children who move to such communities at younger ages. Children's outcomes are most strongly related to the parental employment rates of peers they are more likely to interact with, such as those in their own birth cohort, suggesting that the relationship between children's outcomes and parental employment rates is mediated by social interaction. Our findings imply that community-level changes in one generation can propagate to the next generation and thereby generate rapid changes in economic mobility.
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Using Linked Survey and Administrative Data to Better Measure Income: Implications for Poverty, Program Effectiveness and Holes in the Safety Net
October 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-35
We examine the consequences of underreporting of transfer programs in household survey data for several prototypical analyses of low-income populations. We focus on the Current Population Survey (CPS), the source of official poverty and inequality statistics, but provide evidence that our qualitative conclusions are likely to apply to other surveys. We link administrative data for food stamps, TANF, General Assistance, and subsidized housing from New York State to the CPS at the individual level. Program receipt in the CPS is missed for over one-third of housing assistance recipients, 40 percent of food stamp recipients and 60 percent of TANF and General Assistance recipients. Dollars of benefits are also undercounted for reporting recipients, particularly for TANF, General Assistance and housing assistance. We find that the survey data sharply understate the income of poor households, as conjectured in past work by one of the authors. Underreporting in the survey data also greatly understates the effects of anti-poverty programs and changes our understanding of program targeting, often making it seem that welfare programs are less targeted to both the very poorest and middle income households than they are. Using the combined data rather than survey data alone, the poverty reducing effect of all programs together is nearly doubled while the effect of housing assistance is tripled. We also re-examine the coverage of the safety net, specifically the share of people without work or program receipt. Using the administrative measures of program receipt rather than the survey ones often reduces the share of single mothers falling through the safety net by one-half or more.
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SYNTHETIC DATA FOR SMALL AREA ESTIMATION IN THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
April 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-19
Small area estimates provide a critical source of information used to study local populations. Statistical agencies regularly collect data from small areas but are prevented from releasing detailed geographical identifiers in public-use data sets due to disclosure concerns. Alternative data dissemination methods used in practice include releasing summary/aggregate tables, suppressing detailed geographic information in public-use data sets, and accessing restricted data via Research Data Centers. This research examines an alternative method for disseminating microdata that contains more geographical details than are currently being released in public-use data files. Specifically, the method replaces the observed survey values with imputed, or synthetic, values simulated from a hierarchical Bayesian model. Confidentiality protection is enhanced because no actual values are released. The method is demonstrated using restricted data from the 2005-2009 American Community Survey. The analytic validity of the synthetic data is assessed by comparing small area estimates obtained from the synthetic data with those obtained from the observed data.
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Family Resources and Human Capital in Economic Downturns
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-15
I study how recessions impact the human capital of young adults and how these effects vary over the parent income gradient. Using a novel confidential linked survey dataset from U.S. Census, I document that the negative effects of worse local unemployment shocks on educational attainment are strongly concentrated among middle-class children, with losses in parental home equity being potentially important mechanisms. To probe the aggregate implications of these findings and assess policy implications, I develop a model of selection into college and life-cycle earnings that comprises endogenous parental transfers for education, multiple schooling options, and uncertainty in post-graduation employment outcomes. Simulating a recession in the model produces a 'hollowing out the middle' in lifecycle earnings in the aggregate, and educational borrowing constraints play a key role in this result. Counterfactual policies to expand college access in response to the recession can mitigate these effects but struggle to be cost effective.
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The Mis-Measurement of Permanent Earnings: New Evidence from Social Security Earnings Data
May 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-12
This study investigates the reliability of using short-term averages of earnings as a proxy for permanent earnings in empirical research. An earnings dynamics model is estimated on a large sample of men covering the period from 1983 to 1997 following the cohort-based methodology of Baker and Solon (1999). The analysis uses a unique dataset that matches men in the 1984, 1990 and 1996 Surveys of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to the Social Security Administration's Summary Earnings Records (SER). The results confirm that using a short-term average of earnings can lead to spurious estimates of the effect of lifetime earnings on a particular outcome. In addition, the transitory variance appears to vary considerably over the lifecycle. The share of earnings variance due to transitory factors is higher among blacks and the persistence of transitory shocks appears to be greater for this group as well. Finally, the transitory variance appears to be a more important factor in explaining the overall earnings variance of college educated men than those without college.
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EXAMINING THE LONG TERM MORTALITY EFFECTS OF EARLY HEALTH SHOCKS
March 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-19
A growing literature in economics and other disciplines has tied exposure to early health shocks, particularly in utero influenza, to reductions in a variety of socioeconomic and health outcomes over the life course. However, no current evidence exists that examines this health shock on mortality because of lack of available data. This paper uses newly released files from the large, representative National Longitudinal Mortality Study to explore the mortality effects of the 1918 influenza pandemic for those in utero. While the results on socioeconomic outcomes mimic those in the literature, showing reductions in completed schooling and income fifty years following influenza exposure, the findings also suggest no effect on overall mortality or by categories of cause-of-death. These results are counter-intuitive in their contrast with the many reported effects on cardiovascular health as well as the literature linking education with later mortality
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The New Lifecycle of Women's Employment: Disappearing Humps, Sagging Middle, Expanding Tops
November 2016
Working Paper Number:
carra-2016-07
The new lifecycle of women's employment is initially high and flat, there is a dip in the middle and a phasing out that is more prolonged than for previous cohorts. The hump is gone, the middle is a bit sagging and the top has greatly expanded. We explore the increase in cumulative work experience for women from the 1930s to the 1970s birth cohorts using the SIPP and the HRS. We investigate the changing labor force impact of a birth event across cohorts and by education and also the impact of taking leave or quitting. We find greatly increased labor force experience across cohorts, far less time out after a birth and greater labor force recovery for those who take paid or unpaid leave. More work experience across the lifecycle is related to the increased employment of women in their older ages.
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