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Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'views census'

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Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 11


  • Working Paper

    Job Tasks, Worker Skills, and Productivity

    September 2025

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-25-63

    We present new empirical evidence suggesting that we can better understand productivity dispersion across businesses by accounting for differences in how tasks, skills, and occupations are organized. This aligns with growing attention to the task content of production. We link establishment-level data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey with productivity data from the Census Bureau's manufacturing surveys. Our analysis reveals strong relationships between establishment productivity and task, skill, and occupation inputs. These relationships are highly nonlinear and vary by industry. When we account for these patterns, we can explain a substantial share of productivity dispersion across establishments.
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  • Working Paper

    Tapping Business and Household Surveys to Sharpen Our View of Work from Home

    June 2025

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-25-36

    Timely business-level measures of work from home (WFH) are scarce for the U.S. economy. We review prior survey-based efforts to quantify the incidence and character of WFH and describe new questions that we developed and fielded for the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS). Drawing on more than 150,000 firm-level responses to the BTOS, we obtain four main findings. First, nearly a third of businesses have employees who work from home, with tremendous variation across sectors. The share of businesses with WFH employees is nearly ten times larger in the Information sector than in Accommodation and Food Services. Second, employees work from home about 1 day per week, on average, and businesses expect similar WFH levels in five years. Third, feasibility aside, businesses' largest concern with WFH relates to productivity. Seven percent of businesses find that onsite work is more productive, while two percent find that WFH is more productive. Fourth, there is a low level of tracking and monitoring of WFH activities, with 70% of firms reporting they do not track employee days in the office and 75% reporting they do not monitor employees when they work from home. These lessons serve as a starting point for enhancing WFH-related content in the American Community Survey and other household surveys.
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  • Working Paper

    Gradient Boosting to Address Statistical Problems Arising from Non-Linkage of Census Bureau Datasets

    June 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-27

    This article introduces the twangRDC package, which contains functions to address non-linkage in US Census Bureau datasets. The Census Bureau's Person Identification Validation System facilitates data linkage by assigning unique person identifiers to federal, third party, decennial census, and survey data. Not all records in these datasets can be linked to the reference file and as such not all records will be assigned an identifier. This article is a tutorial for using the twangRDC to generate nonresponse weights to account for non-linkage of person records across US Census Bureau datasets.
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  • Working Paper

    Where Are Your Parents? Exploring Potential Bias in Administrative Records on Children

    March 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-18

    This paper examines potential bias in the Census Household Composition Key's (CHCK) probabilistic parent-child linkages. By linking CHCK data to the American Community Survey (ACS), we reveal disparities in parent-child linkages among specific demographic groups and find that characteristics of children that can and cannot be linked to the CHCK vary considerably from the larger population. In particular, we find that children from low-income, less educated households and of Hispanic origin are less likely to be linked to a mother or a father in the CHCK. We also highlight some data considerations when using the CHCK.
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  • Working Paper

    Coverage of Children in the American Community Survey Based on California Birth Records

    September 2023

    Authors: Gloria G. Aldana

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-23-46

    The U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) collects information on individuals and households. The ACS provides survey-based estimates of children drawn from a sample of the U.S. population. However, survey responses may not match administrative records, such as birth records. Birth records should provide a complete account of all births, along with child-parent relationships and demographic characteristics. California is a state that has both a large population of children and a high undercount for young children. This paper uses California as a case study to examine differences between reported versus unreported children in the ACS based on state birth records. Child reporting rates were lower for more recent data years, younger children, for Black and Hispanic mothers, and for more complex households. Child reporting rates were higher for more educated mothers and for households above the poverty line. Using mother's race and Hispanic ethnicity from the birth records combined with poverty indices from the ACS, this analysis also finds that child reporting does not uniformly vary with poverty status across all race and ethnicity groups. This research builds support for the utility of state birth records in analyzing the undercount of children.
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  • Working Paper

    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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  • Working Paper

    SYNTHETIC DATA FOR SMALL AREA ESTIMATION IN THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY

    April 2013

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-13-19

    Small area estimates provide a critical source of information used to study local populations. Statistical agencies regularly collect data from small areas but are prevented from releasing detailed geographical identifiers in public-use data sets due to disclosure concerns. Alternative data dissemination methods used in practice include releasing summary/aggregate tables, suppressing detailed geographic information in public-use data sets, and accessing restricted data via Research Data Centers. This research examines an alternative method for disseminating microdata that contains more geographical details than are currently being released in public-use data files. Specifically, the method replaces the observed survey values with imputed, or synthetic, values simulated from a hierarchical Bayesian model. Confidentiality protection is enhanced because no actual values are released. The method is demonstrated using restricted data from the 2005-2009 American Community Survey. The analytic validity of the synthetic data is assessed by comparing small area estimates obtained from the synthetic data with those obtained from the observed data.
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  • Working Paper

    Networking Off Madison Avenue

    October 2005

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-05-15

    This paper examines the effect on productivity of having more near advertising agency neighbors and hence better opportunities for meetings and exchange within Manhattan. We will show that there is extremely rapid spatial decay in the benefits of having more near neighbors even in the close quarters of southern Manhattan, a finding that is new to the empirical literature and indicates our understanding of scale externalities is still very limited. The finding indicates that having a high density of commercial establishments is important in enhancing local productivity, an issue in Lucas and Rossi-Hansberg (2002), where within business district spatial decay of spillovers plays a key role. We will argue also that in Manhattan advertising agencies trade-off the higher rent costs of being in bigger clusters nearer 'centers of action', against the lower rent costs of operating on the 'fringes' away from high concentrations of other agencies. Introducing the idea of trade-offs immediately suggests heterogeneity is involved. We will show that higher quality agencies are the ones willing to pay more rent to locate in greater size clusters, specifically because they benefit more from networking. While all this is an exploration of neighborhood and networking externalities, the findings relate to the economic anatomy of large metro areas like New Yorkthe nature of their buzz.
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  • Working Paper

    Employer-Provided Benefit Plans, Workforce Composition and Firm Outcomes

    January 2005

    Working Paper Number:

    tp-2005-01

    What do firms gain by offering benefits? Economists have proposed two payoffs: (i) benefits may be a more cost-effective form of compensation than wages for employees facing high marginal tax rates, and (ii) benefits may attract a more stable, skilled workforce. Both should improve firm outcomes, but we have little evidence on this matter. This paper exploits a rich new dataset to examine how firm productivity and survival are related to benefit offering, and finds that benefit-offering firms have higher productivity and higher survival rates. Differences in firm and workforce characteristics explain some but not all of the differences in outcomes.
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  • Working Paper

    Abandoning the Sinking Ship: The Composition of Worker Flows Prior to Displacement

    August 2002

    Working Paper Number:

    tp-2002-11

    declines experienced by workers several years before displacement occurs. Little attention, however, has been paid to other changes in compensation and employment in firms prior to the actual displacement event. This paper examines changes in the composition of job and worker flows before displacement, and compares the "quality" distribution of workers leaving distressed firms to that of all movers in general. More specifically, we exploit a unique dataset that contains observations on all workers over an extended period of time in a number of US states, combined with survey data, to decompose different jobflow statistics according to skill group and number of periods before displacement. Furthermore, we use quantile regression techniques to analyze changes in the skill profile of workers leaving distressed firms. Throughout the paper, our measure for worker skill is derived from person fixed effects estimated using the wage regression techniques pioneered by Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999) in conjunction with the standard specification for displaced worker studies (Jacobson, LaLonde, and Sullivan 1993). We find that there are significant changes to all measures of job and worker flows prior to displacement. In particular, churning rates increase for all skill groups, but retention rates drop for high-skilled workers. The quantile regressions reveal a right-shift in the distribution of worker quality at the time of displacement as compared to average firm exit flows. In the periods prior to displacement, the patterns are consistent with both discouraged high-skilled workers leaving the firm, and management actions to layoff low-skilled workers.
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