-
Business Dynamics of Innovating Firms: Linking U.S. Patents with Administrative Data on Workers and Firms
July 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-19
This paper discusses the construction of a new longitudinal database tracking inventors and patent-owning firms over time. We match granted patents between 2000 and 2011 to administrative databases of firms and workers housed at the U.S. Census Bureau. We use inventor information in addition to the patent assignee firm name to and improve on previous efforts linking patents to firms. The triangulated database allows us to maximize match rates and provide validation for a large fraction of matches. In this paper, we describe the construction of the database and explore basic features of the data. We find patenting firms, particularly young patenting firms, disproportionally contribute jobs to the U.S. economy. We find patenting is a relatively rare event among small firms but that most patenting firms are nevertheless small, and that patenting is not as rare an event for the youngest firms compared to the oldest firms. While manufacturing firms are more likely to patent than firms in other sectors, we find most patenting firms are in the services and wholesale sectors. These new data are a product of collaboration within the U.S. Department of Commerce, between the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Co-Working Couples and the Similar Jobs of Dual-Earner Households
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-23R
Although an increasing number of studies consider married or cohabiting couples as current, former, or potential co-workers, there is surprisingly little evidence on the extent to which couples work at the same workplace. This study provides benchmark estimates on the frequency with which opposite-sex married and cohabiting couples in the United States share the same occupation, industry, work location, and employer using Census 2000 responses linked with administrative records data. This study contains the first representative estimate of the fraction of couples that share an employer, which is in the range of 11% to 13%. These shared employers can account for much of couples' shared industry, occupation, and location of employment. Longitudinal data on the employment and residency indicates that co-working couples much more likely to have chosen the same employer than to have met at work.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Storms and Jobs: The Effect of Hurricanes on Individuals' Employment and Earnings over the Long Term*
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-21R
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, destroying homes and businesses and causing mass evacuations. The economic effects of disasters are often studied at a regional level, but little is known about the responsiveness of individuals' employment and earnings to the damages, disruption, and rebuilding'particularly in the longer run. Our analysis is based on data that tracks workers over nine years, including seven years after the storms. We estimate models that compare the evolution of earnings for workers who resided in a storm-affected area with those who resided in a suitable control counties. We find that, on average, the storms reduced the earnings of affected individuals during the first year after the storm. These losses reflect various aspects of the short-run disruption caused by the hurricanes, including job separations, migration to other areas, and business contractions. Starting in the third year after the storms, however, we find that the earnings of affected individuals outpaced the earnings of individuals in the control sample. We provide evidence that the long-term earnings gains were the result of wage growth in the affected areas relative to the control areas, due to reduced labor supply and increased labor demand, especially in sectors related to rebuilding. Despite the short-term earnings losses, we find a net increase in average quarterly earnings among affected individuals over the entire post-storm period. However, those who worked in sectors closely tied to tourism or the size of the local population experienced net earnings losses.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Recent Decline of Single Quarter Jobs
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-05
Rates of hiring and job separation fell by as much as a third in the U.S. between the late 1990s and the early 2010s. Half of this decline is associated with the declining incidence of jobs that start and end in the same calendar quarter, employment events that we call 'single quarter jobs.' We investigate this unique subset of jobs and its decline using matched employer-employee data for the years 1996-2012. We characterize the worker demographics and employer characteristics of single quarter jobs, and demonstrate that changes over time in workforce and employer composition explain little of the decline in these jobs. We find that the decline in these jobs accounts for about a third of the decline in the fraction of the population that holds a job in the private sector that occurred from the mid 2000s to the early 2010s. We also find little evidence that single quarter jobs are stepping stones into longer-term employment. Finally, we show that the inclusion or exclusion of these single quarter jobs creates divergent trends in average earnings and the dispersion of earnings for the years 1996-2012. To the extent that administrative records measure the volatile tail of the employment distribution better thanconventional household surveys, these findings show that measurement of short duration jobs matters for economic analysis.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
NOISE INFUSION AS A CONFIDENTIALITY PROTECTION MEASURE FOR GRAPH-BASED STATISTICS
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-30
We use the bipartite graph representation of longitudinally linked em-ployer-employee data, and the associated projections onto the employer and em-ployee nodes, respectively, to characterize the set of potential statistical summar-ies that the trusted custodian might produce. We consider noise infusion as the primary confidentiality protection method. We show that a relatively straightfor-ward extension of the dynamic noise-infusion method used in the U.S. Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators can be adapted to provide the same confidentiality guarantees for the graph-based statistics: all inputs have been modified by a minimum percentage deviation (i.e., no actual respondent data are used) and, as the number of entities contributing to a particular statistic increases, the accuracy of that statistic approaches the unprotected value. Our method also ensures that the protected statistics will be identical in all releases based on the same inputs.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
HIRES, SEPARATIONS, AND THE JOB TENURE DISTRIBUTION IN ADMINISTRATIVE EARNINGS RECORDS
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-29
Statistics on hires, separations, and job tenure have historically been tabulated from survey data. In recent years, these statistics are increasingly being produced from administrative records. In this paper, we discuss the calculation of hires, separations, and job tenure from quarterly administrative records, and we present these labor market statistics calculated from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program. We pay special attention to a phenomenon that survey data is ill-suited to analyze: single quarter jobs, which we define as jobs in which the hire and separation occur in the same quarter. We explore the trends of hires, separations, tenure, and single quarter jobs in the United States for the years 1998-2010. We discuss issues associated with creating these statistics from quarterly earnings records, and we identify the challenges that remain.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
LEHD Infrastructure files in the Census RDC - Overview
June 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-26
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 2011 Snapshot of the LEHD Infrastructure files as they are made available in the Census Bureaus 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 modifcations made to the files to facilitate researcher access.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
A COMPARISON OF PERSON-REPORTED INDUSTRY TO EMPLOYER-REPORTED INDUSTRY
IN SURVEY AND ADMINISTRATIVE DATA
September 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-47
The Census Bureau collects industry information through surveys and administrative data and creates associated public-use statistics. In this paper, we compare person-reported industry in the American Community Survey (ACS) to employer-reported industry from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) that is part of the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program. This research provides necessary information on the use of administrative data as a supplement to survey data industry information, and the findings will be useful for anyone using industry information from either source. Our project is part of a larger effort to compare information on jobs from household survey data to employer-reported information. This research is the first to compare ACS job data to firm-based administrative data. We find an overall industry sector match rate of 75 percent, and a 61 percent match rate at the 4-digit Census Industry Code (CIC) level. Industry match rates vary by sector and by whether industry sector is classified using ACS or LEHD industry information. The educational services and health care and social assistance sectors have among the highest match rates. The management of companies and enterprises sector has the lowest match rate, using either ACS-reported or LEHD-reported sector. For individuals with imputed industry data, the industry sector match rate is only 14 percent. Our findings suggest that the industry distribution and the sample in a particular industry sector will differ depending on whether ACS or LEHD data are used.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
FALLING HOUSE PRICES AND LABOR MOBILITY: EVIDENCE FROM MATCHED EMPLOYER-EMPLOYEE DATA
August 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-43
This study uses worker-level employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau to test whether falling home prices affect a worker's propensity to take a job in a different metropolitan area from where he is currently located. Using a sample of workers from the American Community Survey, I employ a within-MSA-time estimation that compares homeowners to renters in their propensities to relocate for jobs according to data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics database. This strategy allows me to disentangle the influence of house prices from that of other time-varying, location-specific shocks. Estimates show that homeowners who have experienced declines in the nominal value of their home are approximately 20% less likely to take a new job in a location outside of the metropolitan area that they currently live and work in, relative to an equivalent renter. This evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that housing lock-in has contributed to the decreased labor mobility of homeowners during the recent housing bust.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
HUMAN CAPITAL TRAPS? ENCLAVE EFFECTS USING LINKED EMPLOYER-HOUSEHOLD DATA
June 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-29
This study uses linked employer-household data to measure the impact of immigrant social networks, as identified via neighborhood and workplace affiliation, on immigrant earnings. Though ethnic enclaves can provide economic opportunities through job creation and job matching, they can also stifle the assimilation process by limiting interactions between enclave members and non-members. I find that higher residential and workplace ethnic clustering among immigrants is consistently correlated with lower earnings. For immigrants with a high school education or less, these correlations are primarily due to negative self-selection. On the other hand, self-selection fails to explain the lower earnings associated with higher ethnic clustering for immigrants with post-secondary schooling. The evidence suggests that co-ethnic clustering has no discernible effect on the earnings of immigrants with lower education, but may be leading to human capital traps for immigrants who have more than a high school education.
View Full
Paper PDF
