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Estimating the U.S. Citizen Voting-Age Population (CVAP) Using Blended Survey Data, Administrative Record Data, and Modeling: Technical Report
April 2023
Authors:
J. David Brown,
Danielle H. Sandler,
Lawrence Warren,
Moises Yi,
Misty L. Heggeness,
Joseph L. Schafer,
Matthew Spence,
Marta Murray-Close,
Carl Lieberman,
Genevieve Denoeux,
Lauren Medina
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-21
This report develops a method using administrative records (AR) to fill in responses for nonresponding American Community Survey (ACS) housing units rather than adjusting survey weights to account for selection of a subset of nonresponding housing units for follow-up interviews and for nonresponse bias. The method also inserts AR and modeling in place of edits and imputations for ACS survey citizenship item nonresponses. We produce Citizen Voting-Age Population (CVAP) tabulations using this enhanced CVAP method and compare them to published estimates. The enhanced CVAP method produces a 0.74 percentage point lower citizen share, and it is 3.05 percentage points lower for voting-age Hispanics. The latter result can be partly explained by omissions of voting-age Hispanic noncitizens with unknown legal status from ACS household responses. Weight adjustments may be less effective at addressing nonresponse bias under those conditions.
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Improving Estimates of Neighborhood Change with Constant Tract Boundaries
May 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-16
Social scientists routinely rely on methods of interpolation to adjust available data to their research needs. This study calls attention to the potential for substantial error in efforts to harmonize data to constant boundaries using standard approaches to areal and population interpolation. We compare estimates from a standard source (the Longitudinal Tract Data Base) to true values calculated by re-aggregating original 2000 census microdata to 2010 tract areas. We then demonstrate an alternative approach that allows the re-aggregated values to be publicly disclosed, using 'differential privacy' (DP) methods to inject random noise to protect confidentiality of the raw data. The DP estimates are considerably more accurate than the interpolated estimates. We also examine conditions under which interpolation is more susceptible to error. This study reveals cause for greater caution in the use of interpolated estimates from any source. Until and unless DP estimates can be publicly disclosed for a wide range of variables and years, research on neighborhood change should routinely examine data for signs of estimation error that may be substantial in a large share of tracts that experienced complex boundary changes.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Foreign-Born and Native-Born Migration in the U.S.: Evidence from IRS Administrative and Census Survey Records
July 2018
Working Paper Number:
carra-2018-07
This paper details efforts to link administrative records from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to American Community Survey (ACS) and 2010 Census microdata for the study of migration among foreign-born and native-born populations in the United States. Specifically, we (1) document our linkage strategy and methodology for inferring migration in IRS records; (2) model selection into and survival across IRS records to determine suitability for research applications; and (3) gauge the efficacy of the IRS records by demonstrating how they can be used to validate and potentially improve migration responses for native-born and foreign-born respondents in ACS microdata. Our results show little evidence of selection or survival bias in the IRS records, suggesting broad generalizability to the nation as a whole. Moreover, we find that the combined IRS 1040, 1099, and W2 records may provide important information on populations, such as the foreign-born, that may be difficult to reach with traditional Census Bureau surveys. Finally, while preliminary, the results of our comparison of IRS and ACS migration responses shows that IRS records may be useful in improving ACS migration measurement for respondents whose migration response is proxy, allocated, or imputed. Taking these results together, we discuss the potential application of our longitudinal IRS dataset to innovations in migration research on both the native-born and foreign-born populations of the United States.
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The Opportunities and Challenges of Linked IRS Administrative and Census Survey Records in the Study of Migration
July 2018
Working Paper Number:
carra-2018-06
This paper details efforts to link administrative records from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to American Community Survey (ACS) and 2010 Census microdata for the study of migration in the United States. Specifically, we (1) document our linkage strategy and methodology for inferring migration in IRS records; (2) model selection into and survival across IRS records to determine suitability for research applications; and (3) gauge the efficacy of the IRS records by demonstrating how they can be used to validate and potentially improve migration responses in ACS microdata. Our results show little evidence of selection or survival bias in the IRS records, suggesting broad generalizability to the nation as a whole. Moreover, we find that the combined IRS 1040, 1099, and W2 records may provide important information on populations that are hard to reach with traditional Census surveys. Finally, while preliminary, the results of our comparison of IRS and ACS migration responses shows that IRS records may be useful in improving ACS migration measurement for respondents whose migration response is proxy, allocated, or imputed. Taking these results together, we discuss the potential applications of our longitudinal IRS dataset to innovations in migration research in the United States.
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Effects of a Government-Academic Partnership: Has the NSF-Census Bureau Research Network Helped Improve the U.S. Statistical System?
January 2017
Authors:
Lars Vilhuber,
John M. Abowd,
Daniel Weinberg,
Jerome P. Reiter,
Matthew D. Shapiro,
Robert F. Belli,
Noel Cressie,
David C. Folch,
Scott H. Holan,
Margaret C. Levenstein,
Kristen M. Olson,
Jolene Smyth,
Leen-Kiat Soh,
Bruce D. Spencer,
Seth E. Spielman,
Christopher K. Wikle
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-59R
The National Science Foundation-Census Bureau Research Network (NCRN) was established in 2011 to create interdisciplinary research nodes on methodological questions of interest and significance to the broader research community and to the Federal Statistical System (FSS), particularly the Census Bureau. The activities to date have covered both fundamental and applied statistical research and have focused at least in part on the training of current and future generations of researchers in skills of relevance to surveys and alternative measurement of economic units, households, and persons. This paper discusses some of the key research findings of the eight nodes, organized into six topics: (1) Improving census and survey data collection methods; (2) Using alternative sources of data; (3) Protecting privacy and confidentiality by improving disclosure avoidance; (4) Using spatial and spatio-temporal statistical modeling to improve estimates; (5) Assessing data cost and quality tradeoffs; and (6) Combining information from multiple sources. It also reports on collaborations across nodes and with federal agencies, new software developed, and educational activities and outcomes. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the ability of the FSS to apply the NCRN's research outcomes and suggests some next steps, as well as the implications of this research-network model for future federal government renewal initiatives.
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Decennial Census Return Rates: The Role of Social Capital
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-39
This paper explores how useful information about social and civic engagement (social capital)
might be to the U.S. Census Bureau in their efforts to improve predictions of mail return rates for the Decennial Census (DC) at the census tract level. Through construction of Hard-to-count (HRC) scores and multivariate analysis, we find that if information about social capital were available, predictions of response rates would be marginally improved.
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