The U.S. Census Bureau in partnership with a team of external researchers developed a series of questions on the use of robotics in U.S. manufacturing establishments. The questions include: (1) capital expenditures for new and used industrial robotic equipment in 2018, (2) number of industrial robots in operation in 2018, and (3) number of industrial robots purchased in 2018. These questions are to be included in the 2018 Annual Survey of Manufactures. This paper documents the background and cognitive testing process used for the development of these questions.
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The Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS): Cognitive Testing*
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-53
All Census Bureau surveys must meet quality standards before they can be sent to the public for data collection. This paper outlines the pretesting process that was used to ensure that the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS) met those standards. The MOPS is the first large survey of management practices at U.S. manufacturing establishments. The first wave of the MOPS, issued for reference year 2010, was subject to internal expert review and two rounds of cognitive interviews. The results of this pretesting were used to make significant changes to the MOPS instrument and ensure that quality data was collected. The second wave of the MOPS, featuring new questions on data in decision making (DDD) and uncertainty and issued for reference year 2015, was subject to two rounds of cognitive interviews and a round of usability testing. This paper illustrates the effort undertaken by the Census Bureau to ensure that all surveys released into the field are of high quality and provides insight into how respondents interpret the MOPS questionnaire for those looking to utilize the MOPS data.
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Advanced Technologies Adoption and Use by U.S. Firms: Evidence from the Annual Business Survey
December 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-40
We introduce a new survey module intended to complement and expand research on the causes and consequences of advanced technology adoption. The 2018 Annual Business Survey (ABS), conducted by the Census Bureau in partnership with the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), provides comprehensive and timely information on the diffusion among U.S. firms of advanced technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, robotics, and the digitization of business information. The 2018 ABS is a large, nationally representative sample of over 850,000 firms covering all private, nonfarm sectors of the economy. We describe the motivation for and development of the technology module in the ABS, as well as provide a first look at technology adoption and use patterns across firms and sectors. We find that digitization is quite widespread, as is some use of cloud computing. In contrast, advanced technology adoption is rare and generally skewed towards larger and older firms. Adoption patterns are consistent with a hierarchy of increasing technological sophistication, in which most firms that adopt AI or other advanced business technologies also use the other, more widely diffused technologies. Finally, while few firms are at the technology frontier, they tend to be large so technology exposure of the average worker is significantly higher. This new data will be available to qualified researchers on approved projects in the Federal Statistical Research Data Center network.
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Tracking Firm Use of AI in Real Time: A Snapshot from the Business Trends and Outlook Survey
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-16
Timely and accurate measurement of AI use by firms is both challenging and crucial for understanding the impacts of AI on the U.S. economy. We provide new, real-time estimates of current and expected future use of AI for business purposes based on the Business Trends and Outlook Survey for September 2023 to February 2024. During this period, bi-weekly estimates of AI use rate rose from 3.7% to 5.4%, with an expected rate of about 6.6% by early Fall 2024. The fraction of workers at businesses that use AI is higher, especially for large businesses and in the Information sector. AI use is higher in large firms but the relationship between AI use and firm size is non-monotonic. In contrast, AI use is higher in young firms although, on an employment-weighted basis, is U-shaped in firm age. Common uses of AI include marketing automation, virtual agents, and data/text analytics. AI users often utilize AI to substitute for worker tasks and equipment/software, but few report reductions in employment due to AI use. Many firms undergo organizational changes to accommodate AI, particularly by training staff, developing new workflows, and purchasing cloud services/storage. AI users also exhibit better overall performance and higher incidence of employment expansion compared to other businesses. The most common reason for non-adoption is the inapplicability of AI to the business.
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The Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS): Collection and Processing
December 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-51
The U.S. Census Bureau partnered with a team of external researchers to conduct the first-ever large-scale survey of management practices in the United States, the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS), for reference year 2010. With the help of the research team, the Census Bureau expanded and improved the survey for a second wave for reference year 2015. The MOPS is a supplement to the Annual Survey of Manufacturing (ASM), and so the collection and processing strategy for the MOPS built on the methodology for the ASM, while differing on key dimensions to address the unique nature of management relative to other business data. This paper provides detail on the mail strategy pursued for the MOPS, the collection methods for paper and electronic responses, the processing and estimation procedures, and the official Census Bureau data releases. This detail is useful for all those who have interest in using the MOPS for research purposes, those wishing to understand the MOPS data more deeply, and those with an interest in survey methodology.
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Issues and Challenges in Measuring Environmental Expenditures by U.S. Manufacturing: The Redevelopment of the PACE Survey
July 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-20
The Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures (PACE) survey is the most comprehensive source of information on U.S. manufacturing's capital expenditures and operating costs associated with pollution abatement. In 2003, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began a significant initiative to redevelop the survey, guided by the advice of a multi-disciplinary workgroup consisting of economists, engineers, survey design experts, and experienced data users, in addition to incorporating feedback from key manufacturing industries. This paper describes some of these redevelopment efforts. Issues discussed include the approach to developing the new survey instrument, methods used to evaluate (and improve) its performance, innovations in sampling, and the special development and role of outside expertise. The completely redesigned PACE survey was first administered in early 2006.
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Addressing Data Gaps:
Four New Lines of Inquiry in the 2017 Economic Census
September 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-28
We describe four new lines of inquiry added to the 2017 Economic Census regarding (i) retail health clinics, (ii) management practices in health care services, (iii) self-service in retail and service industries, and (iv) water use in manufacturing and mining industries. These were proposed by economists from the U.S. Census Bureau's Center for Economic Studies in order to fill data gaps in current Census Bureau products concerning the U.S. economy. The new content addresses such issues as the rise in importance of health care and its complexity, the adoption of automation technologies, and the importance of measuring water, a critical input to many manufacturing and mining industries.
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Developing Content for the
Management and Organizational Practices Survey-Hospitals (MOPS-HP)
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-25
Nationally representative U.S. hospital data does not exist on management practices, which have been shown to be related to both clinical and financial performance using past data collected in the World Management Survey (WMS). This paper describes the U.S. Census Bureau's development of content for the Management and Organizational Practices Survey Hospitals (MOPS-HP) that is similar to data collected in the MOPS conducted for the manufacturing sector in 2010 and 2015 and the 2009 WMS. Findings from cognitive testing interviews with 18 chief nursing officers and 13 chief financial officers at 30 different hospitals across 7 states and the District of Columbia led to using industry-tested terminology, to confirming chief nursing officers as MOPS-HP respondents and their ability to provide recall data, and to eliminating questions that tested poorly. Hospital data collected in the MOPS-HP would be the first nationally representative data on management practices with queries on clinical key performance indicators, financial and hospital-wide patient care goals, addressing patient care problems, clinical team interactions and staffing, standardized clinical protocols, and incentives for medical record documentation. The MOPS-HP's purpose is not to collect COVID-19 pandemic information; however, data measuring hospital management practices prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic are a byproduct of the survey's one-year recall period (2019 and 2020).
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The Characteristics and Geographic Distribution of Robot Hubs in U.S. Manufacturing Establishments
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-14
We use data from the Annual Survey of Manufactures to study the characteristics and geography of investments in robots across U.S. manufacturing establishments. We find that robotics adoption and robot intensity (the number of robots per employee) is much more strongly related to establishment size than age. We find that establishments that report having robotics have higher capital expenditures, including higher information technology (IT) capital expenditures. Also, establishments are more likely to have robotics if other establishments in the same Core-Based Statistical Area (CBSA) and industry also report having robotics. The distribution of robots is highly skewed across establishments' locations. Some locations, which we call Robot Hubs, have far more robots than one would expect even after accounting for industry and manufacturing employment. We characterize these Robot Hubs along several industry, demographic, and institutional dimensions. The presence of robot integrators and higher levels of union membership are positively correlated with being a Robot Hub.
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The Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS): An Overview*
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-28
Understanding productivity and business dynamics requires measuring production outputs and inputs. Through its surveys and use of administrative data, the Census Bureau collects information on production outputs and inputs including labor, capital, energy, and materials. With the introduction of the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS), the Census Bureau added information on another component of production: management. It has long been hypothesized that management is an important component of firm success, but until recently the study of management was confined to hypotheses, anecdotes, and case studies. Building upon the work of Bloom and Van Reenen (2007), the first-ever large scale survey of management practices in the United States, the MOPS, was conducted by the Census Bureau for 2010. A second, enhanced version of the MOPS is being conducted for 2015. The enhancement includes two new topics related to management: data and decision making (DDD) and uncertainty. As information technology has expanded plants are increasingly able to utilize data in their decision making. Structured management practices have been found to be complementary to DDD in earlier studies. Uncertainty has policy implications because uncertainty is found to be associated with reduced investment and employment. Uncertainty also plays a role in the targeting component of management.
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Measuring U.S. Innovative Activity
March 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-11
Innovation has long been credited as a leading source of economic strength and vitality in the United States because it leads to new goods and services and increases productivity, leading to better living standards. Better measures of innovative activities'activities including but not limited to innovation alone'could improve what we know about the sources of productivity and economic growth. The U.S. Census Bureau either currently collects, or has collected, data on some measures of innovative activities, such as the diffusion of innovations and technologies, human and organizational capital, entrepreneurship and other worker and firm characteristics, and the entry and exit of businesses, that research shows affect productivity and other measures of economic performance. But developing an understanding of how those effects work requires more than just measures of innovative activity. It also requires solid statistical information about core measures of the economy: that is, comprehensive coverage of all industries, including improved measures of output and sales and additional information on inputs and purchased materials at the micro (enterprise) level for the same economic unit over time (so the effects can be measured). Filling gaps in core data would allow us to rule out the possibility that a measure of innovative activity merely proxies for something that is omitted from or measured poorly in the core data, provide more information about innovative activities, and strengthen our ability to evaluate the performance of the entire economy. These gaps can be filled by better integrating existing data and by more structured collections of new data.
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