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Two Perspectives on Commuting: A Comparison of Home to Work Flows Across Job-Linked Survey and Administrative Files
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-34
Commuting flows and workplace employment data have a wide constituency of users including urban and regional planners, social science and transportation researchers, and businesses. The U.S. Census Bureau releases two, national data products that give the magnitude and characteristics of home to work flows. The American Community Survey (ACS) tabulates households' responses on employment, workplace, and commuting behavior. The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program tabulates administrative records on jobs in the LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES). Design differences across the datasets lead to divergence in a comparable statistic: county-to-county aggregate commute flows. To understand differences in the public use data, this study compares ACS and LEHD source files, using identifying information and probabilistic matching to join person and job records. In our assessment, we compare commuting statistics for job frames linked on person, employment status, employer, and workplace and we identify person and job characteristics as well as design features of the data frames that explain aggregate differences. We find a lower rate of within-county commuting and farther commutes in LODES. We attribute these greater distances to differences in workplace reporting and to uncertainty of establishment assignments in LEHD for workers at multi-unit employers. Minor contributing factors include differences in residence location and ACS workplace edits. The results of this analysis and the data infrastructure developed will support further work to understand and enhance commuting statistics in both datasets.
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Using Partially Synthetic Microdata to Protect Sensitive Cells in Business Statistics
February 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-10
We describe and analyze a method that blends records from both observed and synthetic microdata into public-use tabulations on establishment statistics. The resulting tables use synthetic data only in potentially sensitive cells. We describe different algorithms, and present preliminary results when applied to the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics and Synthetic Longitudinal Business Database, highlighting accuracy and protection afforded by the method when compared to existing public-use tabulations (with suppressions).
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LEHD Infrastructure files in the Census RDC - Overview
June 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-26
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau, with the support of several national research agencies, maintains a set of infrastructure files using administrative data provided by state agencies, enhanced with information from other administrative data sources, demographic and economic (business) surveys and censuses. The LEHD Infrastructure Files provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of workers, employers, and their interaction in the U.S. economy. This document describes the structure and content of the 2011 Snapshot of the LEHD Infrastructure files as they are made available in the Census Bureaus secure and restricted-access Research Data Center network. The document attempts to provide a comprehensive description of all researcher-accessible files, of their creation, and of any modifcations made to the files to facilitate researcher access.
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A FIRST STEP TOWARDS A GERMAN SYNLBD: CONSTRUCTING A GERMAN LONGITUDINAL BUSINESS DATABASE
February 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-13
One major criticism against the use of synthetic data has been that the efforts necessary to generate useful synthetic data are so in- tense that many statistical agencies cannot afford them. We argue many lessons in this evolving field have been learned in the early years of synthetic data generation, and can be used in the development of new synthetic data products, considerably reducing the required in- vestments. The final goal of the project described in this paper will be to evaluate whether synthetic data algorithms developed in the U.S. to generate a synthetic version of the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) can easily be transferred to generate a similar data product for other countries. We construct a German data product with infor- mation comparable to the LBD - the German Longitudinal Business Database (GLBD) - that is generated from different administrative sources at the Institute for Employment Research, Germany. In a fu- ture step, the algorithms developed for the synthesis of the LBD will be applied to the GLBD. Extensive evaluations will illustrate whether the algorithms provide useful synthetic data without further adjustment. The ultimate goal of the project is to provide access to multiple synthetic datasets similar to the SynLBD at Cornell to enable comparative studies between countries. The Synthetic GLBD is a first step towards that goal.
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LOOKING BACK ON THREE YEARS OF USING THE SYNTHETIC LBD BETA
February 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-11
Distributions of business data are typically much more skewed than those for household or individual data and public knowledge of the underlying units is greater. As a results, national statistical offices (NSOs) rarely release establishment or firm-level business microdata due to the risk to respondent confidentiality. One potential approach for overcoming these risks is to release synthetic data where the establishment data are simulated from statistical models designed to mimic the distributions of the real underlying microdata. The US Census Bureau's Center for Economic Studies in collaboration with Duke University, the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, and Cornell University made available a synthetic public use file for the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) comprising more than 20 million records for all business establishment with paid employees dating back to 1976. The resulting product, dubbed the SynLBD, was released in 2010 and is the first-ever comprehensive business microdata set publicly released in the United States including data on establishments employment and payroll, birth and death years, and industrial classification. This pa- per documents the scope of projects that have requested and used the SynLBD.
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Dynamically Consistent Noise Infusion and Partially Synthetic Data as Confidentiality Protection Measures for Related Time Series
July 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-13
The Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) provide detailed quarterly statistics on employment measures such as worker and job flows, tabulated by worker characteristics in various combinations. The data are released for several levels of NAICS industries and geography, the lowest aggregation of the latter being counties. Disclosure avoidance methods are required to protect the information about individuals and businesses that contribute to the underlying data. The QWI disclosure avoidance mechanism we describe here relies heavily on the use of noise infusion through a permanent multiplicative noise distortion factor, used for magnitudes, counts, differences and ratios. There is minimal suppression and no complementary suppressions. To our knowledge, the release in 2003 of the QWI was the first large-scale use of noise infusion in any official statistical product. We show that the released statistics are analytically valid along several critical dimensions { measures are unbiased and time series properties are preserved. We provide an analysis of the degree to which confidentiality is protected. Furthermore, we show how the judicious use of synthetic data, injected into the tabulation process, can completely eliminate suppressions, maintain analytical validity, and increase the protection of the underlying confidential data.
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LEHD Data Documentation LEHD-OVERVIEW-S2008-rev1
December 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-43
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LEHD Infrastructure Files in the Census RDC: Overview of S2004 Snapshot
April 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-13
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau, with the support of several national research agencies, has built a set of infrastructure files using administrative data provided by state agencies, enhanced with information from other administrative data sources, demographic and economic (business) surveys and censuses. The LEHD Infrastructure Files provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of workers, employers, and their interaction in the U.S. economy. This document describes the structure and content of the 2004 Snapshot of the LEHD Infrastructure files as they are made available in the Census Bureau's Research Data Center network.
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National Estimates of Gross Employment and Job Flows from the Quarterly Workforce Indicators with Demographic and Industry Detail
June 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-11
The Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) are local labor market data produced and released every quarter by the United States Census Bureau. Unlike any other local labor market series produced in the U.S. or the rest of the world, the QWI measure employment flows for workers (accession and separations), jobs (creations and destructions) and earnings for demographic subgroups (age and gender), economic industry (NAICS industry groups), detailed geography (block (experimental), county, Core- Based Statistical Area, and Workforce Investment Area), and ownership (private, all) with fully interacted publication tables. The current QWI data cover 47 states, about 98% of the private workforce in those states, and about 92% of all private employment in the entire economy. State participation is sufficiently extensive to permit us to present the first national estimates constructed from these data. We focus on worker, job, and excess (churning) reallocation rates, rather than on levels of the basic variables. This permits comparison to existing series from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey and the Business Employment Dynamics Series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The national estimates from the QWI are an important enhancement to existing series because they include demographic and industry detail for both worker and job flow data compiled from underlying micro-data that have been integrated at the job and establishment levels by the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program at the Census Bureau. The estimates presented herein were compiled exclusively from public-use data series and are available for download.
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Using linked employer-employee data to investigate the speed of adjustments in downsizing firms
May 2006
Working Paper Number:
tp-2006-03
When firms are faced with a demand shock, adjustment can take many forms. Firms can adjust
physical capital, human capital, or both. The speed of adjustment may differ as well: costs of
adjustment, the type of shock, the legal and economic enviroment all matter. In this paper, we
focus on firms that downsized between 1992 and 1997, but ultimately survive, and investigate how
the human capital distribution within a firm influences the speed of adjustment, ceteris paribus. In
other words, when do firms use mass layoffs instead of attrition to adjust the level of employment.
We combine worker-level wage records and measures of human capital with firm-level characteristics
of the production function, and use levels and changes in these variables to characterize
the choice of adjustment method and speed. Firms are described/compared up to 9 years prior to
death. We also consider how workers fare after leaving downsizing firms, and analyze if observed
differences in post-separation outcomes of workers provide clues to the choice of adjustment speed.
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