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Assimilation and Coverage of the
Foreign-Born Population in Administrative Records
April 2015
Working Paper Number:
carra-2015-02
The U.S. Census Bureau is researching ways to incorporate administrative data in decennial census and survey operations. Critical to this work is an understanding of the coverage of the population by administrative records. Using federal and third party administrative data linked to the American Community Survey (ACS), we evaluate the extent to which administrative records provide data on foreign-born individuals in the ACS and employ multinomial logistic regression techniques to evaluate characteristics of those who are in administrative records relative to those who are not. We find that overall, administrative records provide high coverage of foreign-born individuals in our sample for whom a match can be determined. The odds of being in administrative records are found to be tied to the processes of immigrant assimilation - naturalization, higher English proficiency, educational attainment, and full-time employment are associated with greater odds of being in administrative records. These findings suggest that as immigrants adapt and integrate into U.S. society, they are more likely to be involved in government and commercial processes and programs for which we are including data. We further explore administrative records coverage for the two largest race/ethnic groups in our sample - Hispanic and non-Hispanic single-race Asian foreign born, finding again that characteristics related to assimilation are associated with administrative records coverage for both groups. However, we observe that neighborhood context impacts Hispanics and Asians differently.
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Creating Linked Historical Data: An Assessment of the Census Bureau's Ability to Assign Protected Identification Keys to the 1960 Census
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
carra-2014-12
In order to study social phenomena over the course of the 20th century, the Census Bureau is investigating the feasibility of digitizing historical census records and linking them to contemporary data. However, historical censuses have limited personally identifiable information available to match on. In this paper, I discuss the problems associated with matching older censuses to contemporary data files, and I describe the matching process used to match a small sample of the 1960 census to the Social Security Administration Numeric Identification System.
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Person Matching in Historical Files using the Census Bureau's Person Validation System
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
carra-2014-11
The recent release of the 1940 Census manuscripts enables the creation of longitudinal data spanning the whole of the twentieth century. Linked historical and contemporary data would allow unprecedented analyses of the causes and consequences of health, demographic, and economic change. The Census Bureau is uniquely equipped to provide high quality linkages of person records across datasets. This paper summarizes the linkage techniques employed by the Census Bureau and discusses utilization of these techniques to append protected identification keys to the 1940 Census.
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Modeling Single Establishment Firm Returns to the 2007 Economic Census
September 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-28
The Economic Census is one of the most important activities that the U.S. Census Bureau performs. It is critical for updating firm ownership/structure and industry information for a large number of businesses in the Census Bureau's Business Register, impacting most other economic programs. Also, it feeds into Bureau of Economic Analysis products, such as benchmark inputoutput accounts and Gross Domestic Product. The overall check-in rate for the 2007 Economic Census was just over 86%. Establishments owned by multi-location companies returned over 90% of their forms, as compared to the roughly two million single-establishment firms sampled in the Census that returned just over 80%. We model the check-in rate for single-establishment firms by using a large number of variables that might be correlated with whether or not a firm returns a form in the Economic Census. These variables are broadly categorized as the characteristics of firms, measures of external factors, and features of the survey design. We use the model for two purposes. First, by including many of the factors that may be correlated with returns we aim to focus limited advertising and outreach resources to low-return segments of the population. Second, we use the model to investigate the efficacy of an unplanned intervention expected to increase return rates: using certified mailing for one of the form follow-ups.
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Management Challenges of the 2010 U.S. Census
August 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-22
This paper gives an insider's perspective on the management approaches used to manage the 2010 Census during its operational phase. The approaches used, the challenges faced (in particular, difficulties faced in automating data collection), and the solutions applied to meet those challenges are described. Finally, six management lessons learned are presented.
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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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An Equilibrium Model of Sorting in an Urban Housing Market: A Study of the Causes and Consequences of Residential Segregation
January 2003
Working Paper Number:
CES-03-01
This paper presents a new equilibrium framework for analyzing economic and policy questions related to the sorting of households within a large metropolitan area. At its heart is a model describing the residential location choices of households that makes explicit the way that individual decisions aggregate to form a housing market equilibrium. The model incorporates choice-specific unobservables, and in the presence of these, a general strategy is provided for identifying household preferences over choice characteristics, including those that depend on household sorting such as neighborhood racial composition. We estimate the model using restricted access Census data that characterize the precise residential and employment locations of a quarter of a million households in the San Francisco Bay Area, yielding accurate measures of references for a wide variety of housing and neighborhood attributes across different types of household. The main economic analysis of the paper uses these estimates in combination with the equilibrium model to explore the causes and consequences of racial segregation in the housing market. Our results indicate that, given the preference structure of households in the Bay Area, the elimination of racial differences in income and wealth would significantly increase the residential segregation of each major racial group. Given the relatively small fractions of Asian, Black, and Hispanic households in the Bay Area (each ~10%), the elimination of racial differences in income/wealth (or, education or employment geography) spreads households in these racial groups much more evenly across the income distribution, allowing more racial sorting to occur at all points in the distribution ' e.g., leading to the formation of wealthy, segregated Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. The partial equilibrium predictions of the model, which do not account for the fact that neighborhood sociodemographic compositions and prices adjust as part of moving to a new equilibrium, lead to the opposite conclusion, emphasizing the value of the general equilibrium approach developed in the paper. Our analysis also provides evidence sorting on the basis of race itself (whether driven by preferences directly or discrimination) leads to large reductions in the consumption of public safety and school quality by all Black and Hispanic households, and large reductions in the housing consumption of upper-income Black and Hispanic households.
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The Longitudinal Business Database
July 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-17
As the largest federal statistical agency and primary collector of data on businesses, households and individuals, the Census Bureau each year conducts numerous surveys intended to provide statistics on a wide range of topics about the population and economy of the United States. The Census Bureau's decennial population and quinquennial economic censuses are unique, providing information on all U.S. households and business establishments, respectively.
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Leaving Home: Modeling the Effect of Civic and Economic Structure on Individual Migration Patterns
June 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-16
This research analyzes the effect of community structure upon individuals' probabilities of moving between 1985 and 1990. Using the full Census sample long form microdata for 1990, we re-allocate adult persons in 1990 to their 1985 county of residence. Then, using origin county macro-structural variables (derived from the Economic Census microdata) and individual characteristics (from Decennial Census microdata), we develop a two level hierarchical linear model. In level 1, we construct a logistic equation modeling individual probabilities of moving. In level 2, we model the contextual effects of origin community structure on these models. These contextual effects fall into two categories: 1) economic conditions that comprise the usual aggregate 'push' factors and 2) civic community factors that act to retain people in their community. Results specify the relationship between community context and individual migration patterns, and demonstrate effects of local economic structure and local civic structure on these individual probabilities. Most notably, we find that civic attributes of communities are associated with a propensity to stay in place, net of community economic factors and individual characteristics.
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