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Papers written by Author(s): 'Kendall Houghton'

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  • Working Paper

    The Census Historical Environmental Impacts Frame

    October 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-66

    The Census Bureau's Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF) is a microdata infrastructure that combines individual-level information on residence, demographics, and economic characteristics with environmental amenities and hazards from 1999 through the present day. To better understand the long-run consequences and intergenerational effects of exposure to a changing environment, we expand the EIF by extending it backward to 1940. The Historical Environmental Impacts Frame (HEIF) combines the Census Bureau's historical administrative data, publicly available 1940 address information from the 1940 Decennial Census, and historical environmental data. This paper discusses the creation of the HEIF as well as the unique challenges that arise with using the Census Bureau's historical administrative data.
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  • Working Paper

    Mobility, Opportunity, and Volatility Statistics (MOVS): Infrastructure Files and Public Use Data

    April 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-23

    Federal statistical agencies and policymakers have identified a need for integrated systems of household and personal income statistics. This interest marks a recognition that aggregated measures of income, such as GDP or average income growth, tell an incomplete story that may conceal large gaps in well-being between different types of individuals and families. Until recently, longitudinal income data that are rich enough to calculate detailed income statistics and include demographic characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, have not been available. The Mobility, Opportunity, and Volatility Statistics project (MOVS) fills this gap in comprehensive income statistics. Using linked demographic and tax records on the population of U.S. working-age adults, the MOVS project defines households and calculates household income, applying an equivalence scale to create a personal income concept, and then traces the progress of individuals' incomes over time. We then output a set of intermediate statistics by race-ethnicity group, sex, year, base-year state of residence, and base-year income decile. We select the intermediate statistics most useful in developing more complex intragenerational income mobility measures, such as transition matrices, income growth curves, and variance-based volatility statistics. We provide these intermediate statistics as part of a publicly released data tool with downloadable flat files and accompanying documentation. This paper describes the data build process and the output files, including a brief analysis highlighting the structure and content of our main statistics.
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  • Working Paper

    Is the Gender Pay Gap Largest at the Top?

    December 2023

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-23-61

    No: it is at least as large at bottom percentiles of the earnings distribution. Conditional quantile regressions reveal that while the gap at top percentiles is largest among the most-educated, the gap at bottom percentiles is largest among the least-educated. Gender differences in labor supply create more pay inequality among the least-educated than they do among the most-educated. The pay gap has declined throughout the distribution since 2006, but it declined more for the most-educated women. Current economics-of-gender research focuses heavily on the top end; equal emphasis should be placed on mechanisms driving gender inequality for noncollege-educated workers.
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  • Working Paper

    The Gender Pay Gap and Its Determinants Across the Human Capital Distribution

    June 2023

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-23-31R

    This paper links American Community Survey data and postsecondary transcript records to examine how the gender pay gap varies across the distribution of education credentials for a sample of 2003-2013 graduates. Although recent literature emphasizes gender inequality among the most-educated, we find a smaller gender pay gap at higher education levels. Field-of-degree and occupation effects explain most of the gap among top bachelor's graduates, while work hours and unobserved channels matter more for less-competitive bachelor's, associate, and certificate graduates. We develop a novel decomposition of the child penalty to examine the role of children in explaining these results.
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  • Working Paper

    Building the Prototype Census Environmental Impacts Frame

    April 2023

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-23-20

    The natural environment is central to all aspects of life, but efforts to quantify its influence have been hindered by data availability and measurement constraints. To mitigate some of these challenges, we introduce a new prototype of a microdata infras tructure: the Census Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF). The EIF provides detailed individual-level information on demographics, economic characteristics, and address level histories ' linked to spatially and temporally resolved estimates of environmental conditions for each individual ' for almost every resident in the United States over the past two decades. This linked microdata infrastructure provides a unique platform for advancing our understanding about the distribution of environmental amenities and hazards, when, how, and why exposures have evolved over time, and the consequences of environmental inequality and changing environmental conditions. We describe the construction of the EIF, explore issues of coverage and data quality, document patterns and trends in individual exposure to two correlated but distinct air pollutants as an application of the EIF, and discuss implications and opportunities for future research.
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