-
Small Business Pulse Survey Estimates by Owner Characteristics and Rural/Urban Designation
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-24
In response to requests from policymakers for additional context for Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS) measures of the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses, we researched developing estimates by owner characteristics and rural/urban locations. Leveraging geographic coding on the Business Register, we create estimates of the effect of the pandemic on small businesses by urban and rural designations. A more challenging exercise entails linking micro-level data from the SBPS with ownership data from the Annual Business Survey (ABS) to create estimates of the effect of the pandemic on small businesses by owner race, sex, ethnicity, and veteran status. Given important differences in survey design and concerns about nonresponse bias, we face significant challenges in producing estimates for owner demographics. We discuss our attempts to meet these challenges and provide discussion about caution that must be used in interpreting the results. The estimates produced for this paper are available for download. Reflecting the Census Bureau's commitment to scientific inquiry and transparency, the micro data from the SBPS will be available to qualified researchers on approved projects in the Federal Statistical Research Data Center network.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
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.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Determination of the 2020 U.S. Citizen Voting Age Population (CVAP) Using Administrative Records and Statistical Methodology Technical Report
October 2020
Authors:
John M. Abowd,
J. David Brown,
Lawrence Warren,
Moises Yi,
Misty L. Heggeness,
William R. Bell,
Michael B. Hawes,
Andrew Keller,
Vincent T. Mule Jr.,
Joseph L. Schafer,
Matthew Spence
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-33
This report documents the efforts of the Census Bureau's Citizen Voting-Age Population (CVAP) Internal Expert Panel (IEP) and Technical Working Group (TWG) toward the use of multiple data sources to produce block-level statistics on the citizen voting-age population for use in enforcing the Voting Rights Act. It describes the administrative, survey, and census data sources used, and the four approaches developed for combining these data to produce CVAP estimates. It also discusses other aspects of the estimation process, including how records were linked across the multiple data sources, and the measures taken to protect the confidentiality of the data.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
United States Earnings Dynamics: Inequality, Mobility, and Volatility
September 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-29
Using data from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) infrastructure files, we study changes over time and across sub-national populations in the distribution of real labor earnings. We consider four large MSAs (Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco) for the period 1998 to 2017, with particular attention paid to the subperiods before, during, and after the Great Recession. For the four large MSAs we analyze, there are clear national trends represented in each of the local areas, the most prominent of which is the increase in the share of earnings accruing to workers at the top of the earnings distribution in 2017 compared with 1998. However, the magnitude of these trends varies across MSAs, with New York and San Francisco showing relatively large increases and Los Angeles somewhere in the middle relative to Detroit whose total real earnings distribution is relatively stable over the period. Our results contribute to the emerging literature on differences between national and regional economic outcomes, exemplifying what will be possible with a new data exploration tool'the Earnings and Mobility Statistics (EAMS) web application'currently under development at the U.S. Census Bureau.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Validating Abstract Representations of Spatial Population Data while considering Disclosure Avoidance
February 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-05
This paper furthers a research agenda for modeling populations along spatial networks and expands upon an empirical analysis to a full U.S. county (Gaboardi, 2019, Ch. 1,2). Specific foci are the necessity of, and methods for, validating and benchmarking spatial data when conducting social science research with aggregated and ambiguous population representations. In order to promote the validation of publicly-available data, access to highly-restricted census microdata was requested, and granted, in order to determine the levels of accuracy and error associated with a network-based population modeling framework. Primary findings reinforce the utility of a novel network allocation method'populated polygons to networks (pp2n) in terms of accuracy, computational complexity, and real runtime (Gaboardi, 2019, Ch. 2). Also, a pseudo-benchmark dataset's performance against the true census microdata shows promise in modeling populations along networks.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS): Collection and Processing
December 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-51
The U.S. Census Bureau partnered with a team of external researchers to conduct the first-ever large-scale survey of management practices in the United States, the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS), for reference year 2010. With the help of the research team, the Census Bureau expanded and improved the survey for a second wave for reference year 2015. The MOPS is a supplement to the Annual Survey of Manufacturing (ASM), and so the collection and processing strategy for the MOPS built on the methodology for the ASM, while differing on key dimensions to address the unique nature of management relative to other business data. This paper provides detail on the mail strategy pursued for the MOPS, the collection methods for paper and electronic responses, the processing and estimation procedures, and the official Census Bureau data releases. This detail is useful for all those who have interest in using the MOPS for research purposes, those wishing to understand the MOPS data more deeply, and those with an interest in survey methodology.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Reservation Nonemployer and Employer Establishments: Data from U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Databases
December 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-50
The presence of businesses on American Indian reservations has been difficult to analyze due to limited data. Akee, Mykerezi, and Todd (AMT; 2017) geocoded confidential data from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Database to identify whether employer establishments were located on or off American Indian reservations and then compared federally recognized reservations and nearby county areas with respect to their per capita number of employers and jobs. We use their methods and the U.S. Census Integrated Longitudinal Business Database to develop parallel results for nonemployer establishments and for the combination of employer and nonemployer establishments. Similar to AMT's findings, we find that reservations and nearby county areas have a similar sectoral distribution of nonemployer and nonemployer-plus-employer establishments, but reservations have significantly fewer of them in nearly all sectors, especially when the area population is below 15,000. By contrast to AMT, the average size of reservation nonemployer establishments, as measured by revenue (instead of the jobs measure AMT used for employers), is smaller than the size of nonemployers in nearby county areas, and this is true in most industries as well. The most significant exception is in the retail sector. Geographic and demographic factors, such as population density and per capita income, statistically account for only a small portion of these differences. However, when we assume that nonemployer establishments create the equivalent of one job and use combined employer-plus-nonemployer jobs to measure establishment size, the employer job numbers dominate and we parallel AMT's finding that, due to large job counts in the Arts/Entertainment/Recreation and Public Administration sectors, reservations on average have slightly more jobs per resident than nearby county areas.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Disclosure Avoidance Techniques Used for the 1970 through 2010 Decennial Censuses of Population and Housing
November 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-47
The U.S. Census Bureau conducts the decennial censuses under Title 13 of the U. S. Code with the Section 9 mandate to not 'use the information furnished under the provisions of this title for any purpose other than the statistical purposes for which it is supplied; or make any publication whereby the data furnished by any particular establishment or individual under this title can be identified; or permit anyone other than the sworn officers and employees of the Department or bureau or agency thereof to examine the individual reports (13 U.S.C. ' 9 (2007)).' The Census Bureau applies disclosure avoidance techniques to its publicly released statistical products in order to protect the confidentiality of its respondents and their data.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
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.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Using Linked Data to Investigate True Intergenerational Change: Three Generations Over Seven Decades
August 2018
Working Paper Number:
carra-2018-09
It is widely thought that immigrants and their families undergo profound cultural and socioeconomic changes as a consequence of coming into contact with U.S. society, but the way this occurs remains unclear and controversial due in large part to data limitations. In this paper, we provide proof of concept for analyses using linked data that allow us to compare outcomes across more 'exact' family generations. Specifically, we are able to follow immigrant parents and their children and grandchildren across seven decades using census and survey data from 1940 to 2014. We describe the data and linkage methodology, evaluate the representativeness of the linked sample, test a method for adjusting for biases that arise from non-representative linkages, and describe the size, diversity, and socioeconomic characteristics of the linked sample. We demonstrate that large sample sizes of linked data will likely permit us to compare several national origin groups across multiple generations.
View Full
Paper PDF