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Self-Employment Income Reporting on Surveys
April 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-19
We examine the relation between administrative income data and survey reports for self-employed and wage-earning respondents from 2000 - 2015. The self-employed report 40 percent more wages and self-employment income in the survey than in tax administrative records; this estimate nets out differences between these two sources that are also shared by wage-earners. We provide evidence that differential reporting incentives are an important explanation of the larger self-employed gap by exploiting a well-known artifact ' self-employed respondents exhibit substantial bunching at the
first EITC kink in their administrative records. We do not observe the same behavior in their survey responses even after accounting for survey measurement concerns.
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LEHD Snapshot Documentation, Release S2021_R2022Q4
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-51
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) data at the U.S. Census Bureau is a quarterly database of linked employer-employee data covering over 95% of employment in the United States. These data are used to produce a number of public-use tabulations and tools, including the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI), LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES), Job-to-Job Flows (J2J), and Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) data products. Researchers on approved projects may also access the underlying LEHD microdata directly, in the form of the LEHD Snapshot restricted-use data product. This document provides a detailed overview of the LEHD Snapshot as of release S2021_R2022Q4, including user guidance, variable codebooks, and an overview of the approvals needed to obtain access. Updates to the documentation for this and future snapshot releases will be made available in HTML format on the LEHD website.
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Redesigning the Longitudinal Business Database
May 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-08
In this paper we describe the U.S. Census Bureau's redesign and production implementation of the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) first introduced by Jarmin and Miranda (2002). The LBD is used to create the Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS), tabulations describing the entry, exit, expansion, and contraction of businesses. The new LBD and BDS also incorporate information formerly provided by the Statistics of U.S. Businesses program, which produced similar year-to-year measures of employment and establishment flows. We describe in detail how the LBD is created from curation of the input administrative data, longitudinal matching, retiming of economic census-year births and deaths, creation of vintage consistent industry codes and noise factors, and the creation and cleaning of each year of LBD data. This documentation is intended to facilitate the proper use and understanding of the data by both researchers with approved projects accessing the LBD microdata and those using the BDS tabulations.
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The Impact of 2010 Decennial Census Hiring on the Unemployment Rate
June 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-19
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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LEHD Infrastructure S2014 files in the FSRDC
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-27R
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 2014 Snapshot of the LEHD Infrastructure files as they are made available in the Census Bureau's 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 modifications made to the files to facilitate researcher access.
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Just Passing Through: Characterizing U.S. Pass-Through Business Owners
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-69
We investigate the use of administrative data on the owners of partnerships and S-corporations to develop new statistics that characterize business owners. Income from these types of entities is "passed through" to owners to be taxed on the owners' tax returns. The information returns associated with such pass-through entities (Form K1 records) make it possible to link individual owners to the businesses they own. These linkages can be leveraged to associate measures of the demographic and human capital characteristics of business owners with the characteristics of the businesses they own. This paper describes measurement issues associated with administrative records on these pass-through entities and their integration with other Census data products. In addition, we document a number of interesting trends in business ownership among pass-through entities. We show a substantial decline in both entry and exit with less churn among both owners and owned businesses. We also show that the owners of pass-through entities are older, more likely to be male, and more likely to be white compared to the working population.
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The Potential for Using Combined Survey and Administrative Data Sources to Study Internal Labor Migration
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-55
This paper introduces a novel data set combining survey data from the American Community Survey (ACS) with administrative data on employment from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program, in order to study geographic labor mobility. With its rich set of information about individuals at the time of the migration decision, large sample size, and near-comprehensive ability to detect labor mobility, the new combined ACS-LEHD data offers several advantages over the existing data sets that are typically used in the study of migration, such as the Decennial Census, Current Population Survey, and Internal Revenue Service data. An overview of how these different data sets can be employed, and examples demonstrating the usefulness of the newly proposed data set, are provided.
Aggregate statistics and stylized facts are generated from the ACS-LEHD data which reveal many of the same features as the existing data sets, including the decline of aggregate mobility throughout the past decade, as well as many of the known demographic differences in migration propensity.
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Public-Use vs. Restricted-Use:
An Analysis Using the American Community Survey
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-12
Statistical agencies frequently publish microdata that have been altered to protect confidentiality. Such data retain utility for many types of broad analyses but can yield biased or Insufficiently precise results in others. Research access to de-identified versions of the restricted-use data with little or no alteration is often possible, albeit costly and time-consuming. We investigate the the advantages and disadvantages of public-use and restricted-use data from the American Community
Survey (ACS) in constructing a wage index. The public-use data used were Public Use Microdata Samples, while the restricted-use data were accessed via a Federal Statistical Research Data Center. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each data source and compare estimated CWIs and standard errors at the state and labor market levels.
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Labor Market Networks and Recovery from Mass Layoffs Before, During, and After the Great Recession
June 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-14
We test the effects of labor market networks defined by residential neighborhoods on re-employment following mass layoffs. We develop two measures of labor market network strength. One captures the flows of information to job seekers about the availability of job vacancies at employers of workers in the network, and the other captures referrals provided to employers by other network members. These network measures are linked to more rapid re-employment following mass layoffs, and to re-employment at neighbors' employers. We also find evidence that network connections ' especially those that provide information about job vacancies ' became less productive during the Great Recession.
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Co-Working Couples and the Similar Jobs of Dual-Earner Households
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-23R
Although an increasing number of studies consider married or cohabiting couples as current, former, or potential co-workers, there is surprisingly little evidence on the extent to which couples work at the same workplace. This study provides benchmark estimates on the frequency with which opposite-sex married and cohabiting couples in the United States share the same occupation, industry, work location, and employer using Census 2000 responses linked with administrative records data. This study contains the first representative estimate of the fraction of couples that share an employer, which is in the range of 11% to 13%. These shared employers can account for much of couples' shared industry, occupation, and location of employment. Longitudinal data on the employment and residency indicates that co-working couples much more likely to have chosen the same employer than to have met at work.
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