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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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Estimating Record Linkage False Match Rate for the Person Identification Validation System
July 2014
Working Paper Number:
carra-2014-02
The Census Bureau Person Identification Validation System (PVS) assigns unique person identifiers to federal, commercial, census, and survey data to facilitate linkages across files. PVS uses probabilistic matching to assign a unique Census Bureau identifier for each person. This paper presents a method to measure the false match rate in PVS following the approach of Belin and Rubin (1995). The Belin and Rubin methodology requires truth data to estimate a mixture model. The parameters from the mixture model are used to obtain point estimates of the false match rate for each of the PVS search modules. The truth data requirement is satisfied by the unique access the Census Bureau has to high quality name, date of birth, address and Social Security (SSN) data. Truth data are quickly created for the Belin and Rubin model and do not involve a clerical review process. These truth data are used to create estimates for the Belin and Rubin parameters, making the approach more feasible. Both observed and modeled false match rates are computed for all search modules in federal administrative records data and commercial data.
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The Person Identification Validation System (PVS): Applying the Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications' (CARRA) Record Linkage Software
July 2014
Working Paper Number:
carra-2014-01
The Census Bureau's Person Identification Validation System (PVS) assigns unique person identifiers to federal, commercial, census, and survey data to facilitate linkages across and within files. PVS uses probabilistic matching to assign a unique Census Bureau identifier for each person. The PVS matches incoming files to reference files created with data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) Numerical Identification file, and SSA data with addresses obtained from federal files. This paper describes the PVS methodology from editing input data to creating the final file.
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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.
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LOOKING BACK ON THREE YEARS OF USING THE SYNTHETIC LBD BETA
February 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-11
Distributions of business data are typically much more skewed than those for household or individual data and public knowledge of the underlying units is greater. As a results, national statistical offices (NSOs) rarely release establishment or firm-level business microdata due to the risk to respondent confidentiality. One potential approach for overcoming these risks is to release synthetic data where the establishment data are simulated from statistical models designed to mimic the distributions of the real underlying microdata. The US Census Bureau's Center for Economic Studies in collaboration with Duke University, the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, and Cornell University made available a synthetic public use file for the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) comprising more than 20 million records for all business establishment with paid employees dating back to 1976. The resulting product, dubbed the SynLBD, was released in 2010 and is the first-ever comprehensive business microdata set publicly released in the United States including data on establishments employment and payroll, birth and death years, and industrial classification. This pa- per documents the scope of projects that have requested and used the SynLBD.
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RANDOMIZED SAFETY INSPECTIONS AND RISK EXPOSURE ON THE JOB: QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL ESTIMATES OF THE VALUE OF A STATISTICAL LIFE
January 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-05
Compensating wages for workplace fatality and accident risks are used to infer the value of a statistical life (VSL), which in turn is used to assess the benefits of human health and safety regulations. The estimation of these wage differentials, however, has been plagued by measurement error and omitted variables. This paper employs the first quasi-experimental design within a labor market setting to overcome such limitations in the ex-tant literature. Specifically, randomly assigned, exogenous federal safety inspections are used to instrument for plant-level risks and combined with confidential U.S. Census data on manufacturing employment to estimate the VSL using a difference-in-differences framework. The VSL is estimated to be between $2 and $4 million ($2011), suggesting prior studies may substantially overstate the value workers place on safety, and therefore, the benefits of health and safety regulations.
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Talent Recruitment and Firm Performance: The Business of Major League Sports
November 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-54R
Firms rely heavily on their investments in human capital to achieve profits. This research takes advantage of detailed information on worker performance and confidential information on firm revenue and operating costs to investigate the relationship between talent migration and firm profitability in major league sports. One key problem that firms have is identifying performance measures for its workforce, especially for potential employees (recruits). In contrast to nearly all other industries, in the industry of professional team sports, detailed information about the past performance of each individual worker (athlete) is known to all potential employers. First, I demonstrate using public data that worker (athlete) statistics aggregated to the establishment (team) level correlate with success on the field (measured in win percentage). Second, I use confidential data from the 2007 Economic Censuses, and from the 2007 and 2008 Service Annual Surveys to investigate the link between individual worker performance and team profitability, controlling for many other aspects of the sports business, specifically taking account of the mobility of athletic 'stars' and 'superstars' from one team to another. The investigations in this paper provide support for the hypothesis that hiring talented individuals (stars) will increase a firm's profit. However, there is not convincing support for the incremental benefit of hiring superstars. The mixed evidence suggests a benefit on balance.
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COMPARING METHODS FOR IMPUTING EMPLOYER HEALTH INSURANCE CONTRIBUTIONS IN THE CURRENT POPULATION SURVEY
August 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-41
The degree to which firms contribute to the payment of workers' health insurance premiums is an important consideration in the measurement of income and for understanding the potential impact of the 2010 Affordable Care Act on employment-based health insurance participation. Currently the U.S. Census Bureau imputes employer contributions in the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey based on data from the 1977 National Medical Care Expenditure Survey. The goal of this paper is to assess the extent to which this imputation methodology produces estimates reflective of the current distribution of employer contributions. The paper uses recent contributions data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component to estimate a new model to inform the imputation procedure and to compare the resulting distribution of contributions. These new estimates are compared with those produced under current production methods across employee and employer characteristics.
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The United States Labor Market: Status Quo or A New Normal?
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-28
The recession of 2007-09 witnessed high rates of unemployment that have been slow to recede. This has led many to conclude that structural changes have occurred in the labor market and that the economy will not return to the low rates of unemployment that prevailed in the recent past. Is this true? The question is important because central banks may be able to reduce unemployment that is cyclic in nature, but not that which is structural. An analysis of labor market data suggests that there are no structural changes that can explain movements in unemployment rates over recent years. Neither industrial nor demographic shifts nor a mismatch of skills with job vacancies is behind the increased rates of unemployment. Although mismatch increased during the recession, it retreated at the same rate. The patterns observed are consistent with unemployment being caused by cyclic phenomena that are more pronounced during the current recession than in prior recessions.
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Do SBA Loans Create Jobs? Estimates from Universal Panel Data and Longitudinal Matching Methods
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-27
This pape reports estimates of the effects of the Small Business Administration (SBA) 7(a) and 504 loan programs on employment. The database links a complete list of all SBA loans in these programs to universal data on all employers in the U.S. economy from 1976 to 2010. Our method is to estimate firm fixed effect regressions using matched control groups for the SBA loan recipients we have constructed by matching exactly on firm age, industry, year, and pre-loan size, plus kernel-based matching on propensity scores estimated as a function of four years of employment history and other variables. The results imply positive average effects on loan recipient employment of about 25 percent or 3 jobs at the mean. Including loan amount, we find little or no impact of loan receipt per se, but an increase of about 5.4 jobs for each million dollars of loans. When focusing on loan recipients and control firms located in high-growth counties (average growth of 22 percent), places where most small firms should have excellent growth potential, we find similar effects, implying that the estimates are not driven by differential demand conditions across firms. Results are also similar regardless of distance of control from recipient firms, suggesting only a very small role for displacement effects. In all these cases, the results pass a "pre-program" specification test, where controls and treated firms look similar in the pre-loan period. Other specifications, such as those using only matching or only regression imply somewhat higher effects, but they fail the pre-program test.
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