Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Federal Statistical Research Data Center'
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Viewing papers 161 through 170 of 193
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Working PaperThe Modern Wholesaler: Global Sourcing, Domestic Distribution, and Scale Economies
December 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-49
Nearly half of all transactions in the $6 trillion market for manufactured goods in the United States were intermediated by wholesalers in 2012, up from 32 percent in 1992. Seventy percent of this increase is due to the growth of 'superstar' firms - the largest one percent of wholesalers. Structural estimates based on detailed administrative data show that the rise of the largest wholesalers was driven by an intuitive linkage between their sourcing of goods from abroad and an expansion of their domestic distribution network to reach more buyers. Both elements require scale economies and lead to increased wholesaler market shares and markups. Counterfactual analysis shows that despite increases in wholesaler market power, intermediated international trade has two benefits for buyers: directly through buyers' valuation of globally sourced products, and indirectly through the passed-through benefits of wholesaler economies of scale and increased quality.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperLEHD 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
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Working PaperFirm Leverage, Labor Market Size, and Employee Pay
August 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-36
We provide new estimates of the wage costs of firms' debt using an empirical approach that exploits within-firm geographical variation in workers' expected unemployment costs due to variation in local labor market in a large sample of public firms. We find that, following an increase in firm leverage, workers with higher unemployment costs experience higher wage growth relative to workers at the same firm with lower unemployment costs. Overall, our estimates suggest wage costs are an important component in the overall cost of debt, but are not as large as implied by estimates based on ex post employee wage losses due to bankruptcy; we estimate that a 10 percentage point increase in firm leverage increases wage compensation for the median worker by 1.9% and total firm wage costs by 17 basis points of firm value.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperPunctuated Entrepreneurship (Among Women)
May 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-26
The gender gap in entrepreneurship may be explained in part by employee non-compete agreements. Exploiting exogenous state-level variation in non-compete policy, I find that women more strictly subject to non-competes are 11-17% more likely to start companies after their employers dissolve. This result is not explained by the incidence of non-competes or lawsuits; however, women face higher relative costs in defending against potential litigation and in returning to paid employment after abandoning their ventures. Thus entrepreneurship among women may be 'punctuated' in that would-be female founders are throttled by non-competes, their potential unleashed only by the failure of their employers.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperDispersion in Dispersion: Measuring Establishment-Level Differences in Productivity
April 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-25RR
We describe new experimental productivity statistics, Dispersion Statistics on Productivity (DiSP), jointly developed and published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau. Productivity measures are critical for understanding economic performance. Official BLS productivity statistics, which are available for major sectors and detailed industries, provide information on the sources of aggregate productivity growth. A large body of research shows that within-industry variation in productivity provides important insights into productivity dynamics. This research reveals large and persistent productivity differences across businesses even within narrowly defined industries. These differences vary across industries and over time and are related to productivity-enhancing reallocation. Dispersion in productivity across businesses can provide information about the nature of competition and frictions within sectors, and about the sources of rising wage inequality across businesses. Because there were no official statistics providing this level of detail, BLS and the Census Bureau partnered to create measures of within-industry productivity dispersion. These measures complement official BLS aggregate and industry-level productivity growth statistics and thereby improve our understanding of the rich productivity dynamics in the U.S. economy. The underlying microdata for these measures are available for use by qualified researchers on approved projects in the Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC) network. These new statistics confirm the presence of large productivity differences and we hope that these new data products will encourage further research into understanding these differences.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperCreditor Rights, Technology Adoption, and Productivity: Plant-Level Evidence
April 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-20
I analyze the impact of stronger creditor rights on productivity using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Following the adoption of anti-recharacterization laws that give lenders greater access to the collateral of firms in financial distress, total factor productivity of treated plants increases by 2.6 percent. This effect is mainly observed among plants belonging to financially constrained firms. Furthermore, treated plants invest in capital of younger vintage and newer technology, and become more capital-intensive. My results suggest that stronger creditor rights relax borrowing constraints and help firms adopt more efficient production technologies.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperRelative Effectiveness of Energy Efficiency Programs versus Market Based Climate Policies in the Chemical Industry
April 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-16
This paper addresses the relative effectiveness of market vs program based climate policies. We compute the carbon price resulting in an equivalent reduction in energy from programs that eliminate the efficiency gap. A reduced-form stochastic frontier energy demand analysis of plant level electricity and fuel data, from energy-intensive chemical sectors, jointly estimates the distribution of energy efficiency and underlying price elasticities. The analysis controls for plant level price endogeneity and heterogeneity to obtain a decomposition of efficiency into persistent (PE) and time-varying (TVE) components. Total inefficiency is relatively small and price elasticities are relatively high. If all plants performed at the 90th percentile of their efficiency distribution, the reduction in energy is between 4% and 13%. A modest carbon price of between $9.48/ton and $14.01/ton CO2 would achieve reductions in energy use equivalent to all manufacturing plants making improvements to close the efficiency gap.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWho are the people in my neighborhood? The 'contextual fallacy' of measuring individual context with census geographies
February 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-11
Scholars deploy census-based measures of neighborhood context throughout the social sciences and epidemiology. Decades of research confirm that variation in how individuals are aggregated into geographic units to create variables that control for social, economic or political contexts can dramatically alter analyses. While most researchers are aware of the problem, they have lacked the tools to determine its magnitude in the literature and in their own projects. By using confidential access to the complete 2010 U.S. Decennial Census, we are able to construct'for all persons in the US'individual-specific contexts, which we group according to the Census-assigned block, block group, and tract. We compare these individual-specific measures to the published statistics at each scale, and we then determine the magnitude of variation in context for an individual with respect to the published measures using a simple statistic, the standard deviation of individual context (SDIC). For three key measures (percent Black, percent Hispanic, and Entropy'a measure of ethno-racial diversity), we find that block-level Census statistics frequently do not capture the actual context of individuals within them. More problematic, we uncover systematic spatial patterns in the contextual variables at all three scales. Finally, we show that within-unit variation is greater in some parts of the country than in others. We publish county-level estimates of the SDIC statistics that enable scholars to assess whether mis-specification in context variables is likely to alter analytic findings when measured at any of the three common Census units.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperInnovation, Productivity Dispersion, and Productivity Growth
February 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-08
We examine whether underlying industry innovation dynamics are an important driver of the large dispersion in productivity across firms within narrowly defined sectors. Our hypothesis is that periods of rapid innovation are accompanied by high rates of entry, significant experimentation and, in turn, a high degree of productivity dispersion. Following this experimentation phase, successful innovators and adopters grow while unsuccessful innovators contract and exit yielding productivity growth. We examine the dynamic relationship between entry, productivity dispersion, and productivity growth using a new comprehensive firm-level dataset for the U.S. We find a surge of entry within an industry yields an immediate increase in productivity dispersion and a lagged increase in productivity growth. These patterns are more pronounced for the High Tech sector where we expect there to be more innovative activities. These patterns change over time suggesting other forces are at work during the post-2000 slowdown in aggregate productivity.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperDisclosure Limitation and Confidentiality Protection in Linked Data
January 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-07
Confidentiality protection for linked administrative data is a combination of access modalities and statistical disclosure limitation. We review traditional statistical disclosure limitation methods and newer methods based on synthetic data, input noise infusion and formal privacy. We discuss how these methods are integrated with access modalities by providing three detailed examples. The first example is the linkages in the Health and Retirement Study to Social Security Administration data. The second example is the linkage of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to administrative data from the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration. The third example is the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data, which links state unemployment insurance records for workers and firms to a wide variety of censuses and surveys at the U.S. Census Bureau. For examples, we discuss access modalities, disclosure limitation methods, the effectiveness of those methods, and the resulting analytical validity. The final sections discuss recent advances in access modalities for linked administrative data.View Full Paper PDF
