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Using Small-Area Estimation (SAE) to Estimate Prevalence of Child Health Outcomes at the Census Regional-, State-, and County-Levels
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-48
In this study, we implement small-area estimation to assess the prevalence of child health outcomes at the county, state, and regional levels, using national survey data.
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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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The Color of Money: Federal vs. Industry Funding of University Research
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-26
U.S. universities, which are important producers of new knowledge, have experienced a shift in research funding away from federal and towards private industry sources. This paper compares the effects of federal and private university research funding, using data from 22 universities that include individual-level payments for everyone employed on all grants for each university year and that are linked to patent and Census data, including IRS W-2 records. We instrument for an individual's source of funding with government-wide R&D expenditure shocks within a narrow field of study. We find that a higher share of federal funding causes fewer but more general patents, more high-tech entrepreneurship, a higher likelihood of remaining employed in academia, and a lower likelihood of joining an incumbent firm. Increasing the private share of funding has opposite effects for most outcomes. It appears that private funding leads to greater appropriation of intellectual property by incumbent firms.
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Leapfrogging the Melting Pot? European Immigrants' Intergenerational Mobility Across the 20th Century
August 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-20
During the early twentieth century, industrial-era European immigrants entered the United States with lower levels of education than the U.S. average. However, empirical research has yielded unclear and inconsistent evidence about the extent and pace of their integration, leaving openings for arguments that contest the narrative that these groups experienced rapid integration and instead assert that educational deficits among lower-status groups persisted across multiple generations. Here, we advance another argument, that European immigrants may have 'leapfrogged' or exceeded U.S.-born non-Hispanic white attainment by the third generation. To assess these ideas, we reconstituted three-generation families by linking individuals across the 1940 Census, years 1973, 1979, 1981-90 of the Current Population Survey, the 2000 Census, and years 2001-2017 of the American Community Survey. Results show that most European immigrant groups not only caught up with U.S.-born whites by the second generation, but surpassed them, and this advantage further increased in the third generation. This research provides a new understanding of the time to integration for 20th century European immigrant groups by showing that they integrated at a faster pace than previously thought, indicative of a process of accelerated upward mobility.
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An Economic Analysis of Privacy Protection and Statistical Accuracy as Social Choices
August 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-35
Statistical agencies face a dual mandate to publish accurate statistics while protecting respondent privacy. Increasing privacy protection requires decreased accuracy. Recognizing this as a resource allocation problem, we propose an economic solution: operate where the marginal cost of increasing privacy equals the marginal benefit. Our model of production, from computer science, assumes data are published using an efficient differentially private algorithm. Optimal choice weighs the demand for accurate statistics against the demand for privacy. Examples from U.S. statistical programs show how our framework can guide decision-making. Further progress requires a better understanding of willingness-to-pay for privacy and statistical accuracy.
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Disclosure 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.
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DOES PARENTS' ACCESS TO FAMILY PLANNING INCREASE CHILDREN'S OPPORTUNITIES? EVIDENCE FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY AND THE EARLY YEARS OF TITLE X
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-67
This paper examines the relationship between parents' access to family planning and the economic resources of their children. Using the county-level introduction of U.S. family planning programs between 1964 and 1973, we find that children born after programs began had 2.8% higher household incomes. They were also 7% less likely to live in poverty and 12% less likely to live in households receiving public assistance. After accounting for selection, the direct effects of family planning programs on parents' incomes account for roughly two thirds of these gains.
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Examining Multi-Level Correlates of Suicide by Merging NVDRS and ACS Data
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-25
This paper describes a novel database and an associated suicide event prediction model that surmount longstanding barriers in suicide risk factor research. The database comingles person-level records from the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) and the American Community Survey (ACS) to establish a case-control study sample that includes all identified suicide cases, while faithfully reflecting general population sociodemographics, in sixteen USA states during the years 2005 2011. It supports a statistical model of individual suicide risk that accommodates person-level factors and the moderation of these factors by their community rates. Named the United States Multi-Level Suicide Data Set (US-MSDS), the database was developed outside the RDC laboratory using publicly available ACS microdata, and reconstructed inside the laboratory using restricted access ACS microdata. Analyses of the latter version yielded findings that largely amplified but also extended those obtained from analyses of the former. This experience shows that the analytic precision achievable using restricted access ACS data can play an important role in conducting social research, although it also indicates that publicly available ACS data have considerable value in conducting preliminary analyses and preparing to use an RDC laboratory. The database development strategy may interest scientists investigating sociodemographic risk factors for other types of low-frequency mortality.
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DOES FAMILY PLANNING INCREASE CHILDREN'S OPPORTUNITIES?
EVIDENCE FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY AND THE EARLY YEARS OF TITLE X
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-29
This paper examines the relationship between parents' access to family planning and the economic resources of the average child. Using the county-level introduction of U.S. family planning programs between 1964 and 1973, we find that children born after programs began had 2.5% higher household incomes. They were also 7% less likely to live in poverty and 11% less likely to live in households receiving public assistance. Even with extreme assumptions about selection, these estimates are large enough to imply that family planning programs directly increased children's resources, including increases in mothers' paid work and increased childbearing within marriage.
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FIFTY YEARS OF FAMILY PLANNING:
NEW EVIDENCE ON THE LONG-RUN EFFECTS OF INCREASING ACCESS TO CONTRACEPTION
February 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-15
This paper assembles new evidence on some of the longer-term consequences of U.S. family planning policies, defined in this paper as those increasing legal or financial access to modern contraceptives. The analysis leverages two large policy changes that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s: first, the interaction of the birth control pill's introduction with Comstock-era restrictions on the sale of contraceptives and the repeal of these laws after Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965; and second, the expansion of federal funding for local family planning programs from 1964 to 1973. Building on previous research that demonstrates both policies' effects on fertility rates, I find suggestive evidence that individuals' access to contraceptives increased their children's college completion, labor force participation, wages, and family incomes decades later.
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