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Parental Earnings and Children's Well-Being and Future Success: An Analysis of the SIPP Matched to SSA Earnings Data
April 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-12
We estimate the association between parental earnings and a wide variety of indicators of child well-being using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) matched to administrative earnings records from the Social Security Administration. We find that the use of longer time averages of parent earnings leads to substantially higher estimated effects compared to using only a single year of parent earnings. This suggests that previous studies may have understated the potential efficacy of income support programs to improve child well-being. Further, policy makers should take into account the attenuation bias when comparing studies that use different time spans to measure parental income. Using 7 year time averages of parent earnings, we show for example, that a doubling of parent earnings reduces the probability of a teenager reporting being in poor health by close to 50 percent and a child having insufficient food by 75 percent.
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Towards Unrestricted Public Use Business Microdata: The Synthetic Longitudinal Business Database
February 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-04
In most countries, national statistical agencies do not release establishment-level business microdata, because doing so represents too large a risk to establishments\' confidentiality. One approach with the potential for overcoming these risks is to release synthetic data; that is, the released establishment data are simulated from statistical models designed to mimic the distributions of the underlying real microdata. In this article, we describe an application of this strategy to create a public use file for the Longitudinal Business Database, an annual economic census of establishments in the United States comprising more than 20 million records dating back to 1976. The U.S. Bureau of the Census and the Internal Revenue Service recently approved the release of these synthetic microdata for public use, making the synthetic Longitudinal Business Database the first-ever business microdata set publicly released in the United States. We describe how we created the synthetic data, evaluated analytical validity, and assessed disclosure risk.
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Information and Industry Dynamics
August 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-16R
This paper develops a dynamic industry model in which firms compete to acquire customers over time by disseminating information about themselves under the presence of random shocks to their efficiency. The properties of the model's stationary equilibrium are related to empirical regularities on firm and industry dynamics. As an application of the model, the effects of a decline in the cost of information dissemination on firm and industry dynamics are explored.
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Resolving the Tension Between Access and Confidentiality: Past Experience and Future Plans at the U.S. Census Bureau
September 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-33
This paper provides an historical context for access to U.S. Federal statistical data with a primary focus on the U.S. Census Bureau. We review the various modes used by the Census Bureau to make data available to users, and highlight the costs and benefits associated with each. We highlight some of the specific improvements underway or under consideration at the Census Bureau to better serve its data users, as well as discuss the broad strategies employed by statistical agencies to respond to the challenges of data access.
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Long Term Effects of Military Service on the Distribution of Earnings
August 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-17
I estimate the long term effect of military service on quantiles of earnings and education using the Vietnam draft lottery eligibility status as an instrument. I compare the local quantile treatment effect estimator studied by Abadie, Angrist, and Imbens (2002) to the instrumental variables quantile regression technique developed by Chernozhukov and Hansen (2008). Ordinary quantile regression shows a large negative association between service in Vietnam and earnings of white men, with the effect increasing in magnitude for the upper quantiles. Quantile treatment effects estimates show the opposite pattern, although much smaller in magnitude, with a small negative effect at the lower end of the distribution, and a small positive effect at the upper end. This suggests the ordinary quantile result is due to heterogeneous selection effects. The two methods of quantile treatment effects estimation give similar results.
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Complex Survey Questions and the Impact of Enumeration Procedures: Census/American Community Survey Disability Questions
April 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-10
This paper explores challenges relating to the identification of the population with disabilities,focusing on Census Bureau efforts using the 2000 Decennial Census Long-Form (Census 2000) and 2000-2005 American Community Survey (ACS). In particular, the analyses explore the impact of survey methods on responses to the work limitation (i.e., employment disability) question in these two Census products. Building on the research of Stern (2003) and Stern and Brault (2005), we look for further evidence of misreporting of an employment disability by specific sub-populations using the participation in the Supplemental Security Income program as an exogenous employment disability status indicator along with a subset of ACS disability questions. We expand upon these earlier studies by examining both false-positive and falsenegative reports of employment disability by implementing logit estimations to examine the role of respondent/enumerator error on the accuracy of the employment disability response. In this manner, we enhance our understanding of Census 2000 and ACS responses to employment disability questions through an exploration of the role of enumeration procedures in two types of misclassifications, as well as by evaluating existing data and estimates to uncover characteristics that might make an individual more likely to misreport an employment disability.
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Measuring Inequality Using Censored Data: A Multiple Imputation Approach
April 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-05
To measure income inequality with right censored (topcoded) data, we propose multiple imputation for censored observations using draws from Generalized Beta of the Second Kind distributions to provide partially synthetic datasets analyzed using complete data methods. Estimation and inference uses Reiter's (Survey Methodology 2003) formulae. Using Current Population Survey (CPS) internal data, we find few statistically significant differences in income inequality for pairs of years between 1995 and 2004. We also show that using CPS public use data with cell mean imputations may lead to incorrect inferences about inequality differences. Multiply-imputed public use data provide an intermediate solution.
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An Analysis of Key Differences in Micro Data: Results from the Business List Comparison Project
September 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-28
The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census each maintain a business register, a universe of all U.S. business establishments and their characteristics, created from independent sources. Both registers serve critical functions such as supplying aggregate data inputs for certain national statistics generated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. This paper examines key micro-level differences across these two business registers.
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The Going Public Decision and the Product Market
July 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-20
At what point in a firm's life should it go public? How do a firm's ex ante product market characteristics relate to its going public decision? Further, what are the implications of a firm going public on its post-IPO operating and product market performance? In this paper, we answer the above questions by conducting the first large sample study of the going public decisions of U.S. firms in the literature. We use the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) of the U.S. Census Bureau, which covers the entire universe of private and public U.S. manufacturing firms. Our findings can be summarized as follows. First, a private firm's product market characteristics (market share, competition, capital intensity, cash flow riskiness) significantly affect its likelihood of going public. Second, private firms facing less information asymmetry and those with projects that are cheaper for outsiders to evaluate are more likely to go public (consistent with Chemmanur and Fulghieri (1999)). Third, IPOs of firms occur at the peak of their productivity cycle (consistent with Clementi (2002)): the dynamics of total factor productivity (TFP) and sales growth exhibit an inverted U-shaped pattern. Finally, sales, capital expenditures, and other performance variables exhibit a consistently increasing pattern over the years before and after the IPO. The last two findings are consistent with the widely documented post-IPO operating underperformance of firms being due to the real investment effects of a firm going public, and inconsistent with underperformance being solely due to earnings management immediately prior to the IPO.
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What Happens When Firms Patent? New Evidence from U.S. Economic Census Data
January 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-03
In this study, we present novel statistics on the patenting in US manufacturing and new evidence on the question of what happens when firms patent. We do so by creating a comprehensive firm-patent matched dataset that links the NBER patent data (covering the universe of patents) to firm data from the US Census Bureau (which covers the universe of all firms with paid employees). Our linked dataset covers more than 48,000 unique assignees (compared to about 4,100 assignees covered by the Compustat-NBER link), representing almost two-thirds of all non-individual, non-university, non-government assignees from 1975 to 1997. We use the data to present some basic but novel statistics on the role of patenting in US manufacturing, including strong evidence confirming the highly skewed nature of patenting activity. Next, we examine what happens when firms patent by looking at a large sample of first time patentees. We find that while there are significant cross-sectional differences in size and total factor productivity between patentee firms and non-patentee firms, changes in patentownership status within firms is associated with a contemporaneous and substantial increase in firm size, but little to no change in total factor productivity. This evidence suggests that patenting is associated with firm growth through new product innovations (firm scope) rather than through reduction in the cost of producing existing products (firm productivity). Consistent with this explanation, we find that when firms patent, there is a contemporaneous increase in the number of products that the firms produce. Estimates of (within-firm) elasticity of firm characteristics to patent stock confirm our results. Our findings are robust to alternative measures of size and productivity, and to various sample selection criteria.
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