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Revisions to the LEHD Establishment Imputation Procedure and Applications to Administrative Job Frame
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-51
The Census Bureau is developing a 'job frame' to provide detailed job-level employment data across the U.S. through linked administrative records such as unemployment insurance and IRS W-2 filings. This working paper summarizes the research conducted by the job frame development team on modifying and extending the LEHD Unit-to-Worker (U2W) imputation procedure for the job frame prototype. It provides a conceptual overview of the U2W imputation method, highlighting key challenges and tradeoffs in its current application. The paper then presents four imputation methodologies and evaluates their performance in areas such as establishment assignment accuracy, establishment size matching, and job separation rates. The results show that all methodologies perform similarly in assigning workers to the correct establishment. Non-spell-based methodologies excel in matching establishment sizes, while spell-based methodologies perform better in accurately tracking separation rates.
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Access to Financing and Racial Pay Gap Inside Firms
July 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-36
How does access to financing influence racial pay inequality inside firms? We answer this question using the employer-employee matched data administered by the U.S. Census Bureau and detailed resume data recording workers' career trajectories. Exploiting exogenous shocks to firms' debt capacity, we find that better access to debt financing significantly narrows the earnings gap between minority and white workers. Minority workers experience a persistent increase in earnings and also a rise in the pay rank relative to white workers in the same firm. The effect is more pronounced among mid- and high-skill minority workers, in areas where white workers are in shorter supply, and for firms with ex-ante less diverse boards and greater pre-existing racial inequality. With better access to financing, minority workers are also more likely to be promoted or be reassigned to technology-oriented occupations compared to white workers. Our evidence is consistent with access to financing making firms better utilize minority workers' human capital.
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Managing Employee Retention Concerns: Evidence from U.S. Census Data
February 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-07
Using Census microdata on 14,000 manufacturing plants, we examine how firms man age employee retention concerns in response to local wage pressure. We validate our measure of employee retention concerns by documenting that plants respond with wage increases, and do so more when the employees' human capital is higher. We doc ument substantial use of non-wage levers in response to retention concerns. Plants shift incentives to increase the likelihood that bonuses can be paid: performance target transparency declines, as does the use of localized performance metrics for bonuses. Furthermore, promotions become more meritocratic, ensuring key employees can be promoted and retained. Lastly, decision-making authority at the plant-level increases, offering more agency to local employees. We find evidence consistent with inequity aversion constraining the response to local wage pressure, and document spillovers in both wage and non-wage reactions across same-firm plants.
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Earnings Growth, Job Flows and Churn
April 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-15
How much do workers making job-to-job transitions benefit from moving away from a shrinking and towards a growing firm? We show that earnings growth in the transition increases with net employment growth at the destination firm and, to a lesser extent, decreases if the origin firm is shrinking. So, we sum the effect of leaving a shrinking and entering a growing firm and remove the excess turnover-related hires because gross hiring has a much smaller association with earnings growth than net employment growth. We find that job-to-job transitions with the cross-firm job flow have 23% more earnings growth than average.
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Do Cash Windfalls Affect Wages? Evidence from R&D Grants to Small Firms
February 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-06
This paper examines how employee earnings at small firms respond to a cash flow shock in the form of a government R&D grant. We use ranking data on applicant firms, which we link to IRS W2 earnings and other U.S. Census Bureau datasets. In a regression discontinuity design, we find that the grant increases average earnings with a rent-sharing elasticity of 0.07 (0.21) at the employee (firm) level. The beneficiaries are incumbent employees who were present at the firm before the award. Among incumbent employees, the effect increases with worker tenure. The grant also leads to higher employment and revenue, but productivity growth cannot fully explain the immediate effect on earnings. Instead, the data and a grantee survey are consistent with a backloaded wage contract channel, in which employees of financially constrained firms initially accept relatively low wages and are paid more when cash is available.
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Maternal Labor Dynamics: Participation, Earnings, and Employer Changes
December 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-33
This paper describes the labor dynamics of U.S. women after they have had their first and subsequent children. We build on the child penalty literature by showing the heterogeneity of the size and pattern of labor force participation and earnings losses by demographic characteristics of mothers and the characteristics of their employers. The analysis uses longitudinal administrative earnings data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics database combined with the Survey of Income and Program Participation survey data to identify women, their fertility timing, and employment. We find that women experience a large and persistent decrease in earnings and labor force participation after having their first child. The penalty grows over time, driven by the birth of subsequent children. Non-white mothers, unmarried mothers, and mothers with more education are more likely to return to work following the birth of their first child. Conditional on returning to the labor force, women who change employers earn more after the birth of their first child than women who return to their pre-birth employers. The probability of returning to the pre-birth employer and industry is heterogeneous over both the demographics of mothers and the characteristics of their employers.
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Human Capital, Parent Size and the Destination Industry of Spinouts
October 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-30
We study how spinout founders' human capital and parent size relate to founders' propensity to stay in the same industry as their parents or to go outside the industry. Individuals with high human capital face a higher performance penalty if they form spinouts outside the parent industry, but they also face greater deterrence from large parents if they stay in that industry. Using matched employer employee data on spinout founders and their coworkers, we find that individuals with higher human capital are less likely to form spinouts in distant industries than in the parent's industry. Further, we find that as parent size increases, such individuals are less likely to form spinouts in the parent's industry and more likely to form spinouts in distant industries.
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Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in the United States:
New Evidence from Worker-Firm Linked Data
February 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-07
This paper examines the extent and consequences of Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity (DNWR) using administrative worker-firm linked data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) program for a large representative U.S. state. Prior to the Great Recession, only 7-8% of job stayers are paid the same nominal hourly wage rate as one year earlier - substantially less than previously found in survey-based data - and about 20% of job stayers experience a wage cut. During the Great Recession, the incidence of wage cuts increases to 30%, followed by a large rise in the proportion of wage freezes to 16% as the economy recovers. Total earnings of job stayers exhibit even fewer zero changes and a larger incidence of reductions than hourly wage rates, due to systematic variations in hours worked. The results are consistent with concurrent findings in the literature that reductions in base pay are exceedingly rare but that firms use different forms of non-base pay and variations in hours worked to flexibilize labor cost. We then exploit the worker-firm link of the LEHD and find that during the Great Recession, firms with indicators of DNWR reduced employment by about 1.2% more per year. This negative effect is driven by significantly lower hiring rates and persists into the recovery. Our results suggest that despite the relatively large incidence of wage cuts in the aggregate, DNWR has sizable allocative consequences.
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Predictive Analytics and Organizational Architecture:
Plant-Level Evidence from Census Data
January 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-02
We examine trends in the use of predictive analytics for a sample of more than 25,000 manufacturing plants using proprietary data from the US Census Bureau. Comparing 2010 and 2015, we find that use of predictive analytics has increased markedly, with the greatest use in younger plants, professionally-managed firms, more educated workforces, and stable industries. Decisions on data to be gathered originate from headquarters and are associated with less delegation of decision-making and more widespread awareness of quantitative targets among plant employees. Performance targets become more accurate, long-term oriented, and linked to company-wide performance, and management incentives strengthen, both in terms of monetary bonuses and career outcomes. Plants increasing predictive analytics become more efficient, with lower inventory, increased volume of shipments, narrower product mix, reduced management payroll and increased use of flexible and temporary employees. Results are robust to a specification based on increased government demand for data.
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How long do early career decisions follow women? The impact of industry and firm size history on the gender and motherhood wage gaps
January 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-05
We add to the gender wage gap literature by considering how characteristics of past employers are correlated with current wages and whether differences between the work histories of men and women are related to the persistent gender wage gap. Our hypothesis is that women have spent less time over the course of their careers in higher paying industries and have less job- and industry-specific human capital and that these characteristics are correlated with male-female earnings differences. Additionally, we expect that difference in the work histories between women with children and childless women might help explain the observed motherhood wage gap. We use unique administrative employer history data to conduct a standard decomposition exercise to determine the impact of differences in observable job history characteristics on the gender and motherhood wage gaps. We find that industry work history has two opposing effects on both these wage gaps. The distribution of work experience across industries contributes to increasing the wage gaps, but the share of experience spent in the industry sector of the current job works to decrease earnings differences.
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