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The Census Historical Environmental Impacts Frame
October 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-66
The Census Bureau's Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF) is a microdata infrastructure that combines individual-level information on residence, demographics, and economic characteristics with environmental amenities and hazards from 1999 through the present day. To better understand the long-run consequences and intergenerational effects of exposure to a changing environment, we expand the EIF by extending it backward to 1940. The Historical Environmental Impacts Frame (HEIF) combines the Census Bureau's historical administrative data, publicly available 1940 address information from the 1940 Decennial Census, and historical environmental data. This paper discusses the creation of the HEIF as well as the unique challenges that arise with using the Census Bureau's historical administrative data.
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The 2010 Census Confidentiality Protections Failed, Here's How and Why
December 2023
Authors:
Lars Vilhuber,
John M. Abowd,
Ethan Lewis,
Nathan Goldschlag,
Robert Ashmead,
Daniel Kifer,
Philip Leclerc,
Rolando A. Rodr�guez,
Tamara Adams,
David Darais,
Sourya Dey,
Simson L. Garfinkel,
Scott Moore,
Ramy N. Tadros
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-63
Using only 34 published tables, we reconstruct five variables (census block, sex, age, race, and ethnicity) in the confidential 2010 Census person records. Using the 38-bin age variable tabulated at the census block level, at most 20.1% of reconstructed records can differ from their confidential source on even a single value for these five variables. Using only published data, an attacker can verify that all records in 70% of all census blocks (97 million people) are perfectly reconstructed. The tabular publications in Summary File 1 thus have prohibited disclosure risk similar to the unreleased confidential microdata. Reidentification studies confirm that an attacker can, within blocks with perfect reconstruction accuracy, correctly infer the actual census response on race and ethnicity for 3.4 million vulnerable population uniques (persons with nonmodal characteristics) with 95% accuracy, the same precision as the confidential data achieve and far greater than statistical baselines. The flaw in the 2010 Census framework was the assumption that aggregation prevented accurate microdata reconstruction, justifying weaker disclosure limitation methods than were applied to 2010 Census public microdata. The framework used for 2020 Census publications defends against attacks that are based on reconstruction, as we also demonstrate here. Finally, we show that alternatives to the 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System with similar accuracy (enhanced swapping) also fail to protect confidentiality, and those that partially defend against reconstruction attacks (incomplete suppression implementations) destroy the primary statutory use case: data for redistricting all legislatures in the country in compliance with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
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Where to Build Affordable Housing?
Evaluating the Tradeoffs of Location
December 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-62R
How does the location of affordable housing affect tenant welfare, the distribution of assistance, and broader societal objectives such as racial integration? Using administrative data on tenants of units funded by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), we first show that characteristics such as race and proxies for need vary widely across neighborhoods. Despite fixed eligibility requirements, LIHTC developments in more opportunity-rich neighborhoods house tenants who are higher income, more educated, and far less likely to be Black. To quantify the welfare implications, we build a residential choice model in which households choose from both market-rate and affordable housing options, where the latter must be rationed. While building affordable housing in higher-opportunity neighborhoods costs more, it also increases household welfare and reduces city-wide segregation. The gains in household welfare, however, accrue to more moderate-need, non-Black/Hispanic households at the expense of other households. This change in the distribution of assistance is primarily due to a 'crowding out' effect: households that only apply for assistance in higher-opportunity neighborhoods crowd out those willing to apply regardless of location. Finally, other policy levers'such as lowering the income limits used for means-testing'have only limited effects relative to the choice of location.
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Are Immigrants More Innovative? Evidence from Entrepreneurs
November 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-56
We evaluate the contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs to innovation in the U.S. using linked survey-administrative data on 199,000 firms with a rich set of innovation measures and other firm and owner characteristics. We find that not only are immigrants more likely than natives to own businesses, but on average their firms display more innovation activities and outcomes. Immigrant owned firms are particularly more likely to create completely new products, improve previous products, use new processes, and engage in both basic and applied R&D, and their efforts are reflected in substantially higher levels of patents and productivity. Immigrant owners are slightly less likely than natives to imitate products of others and to hire more employees. Delving into potential explanations of the immigrant-native differences, we study other characteristics of entrepreneurs, access to finance, choice of industry, immigrant self-selection, and effects of diversity. We find that the immigrant innovation advantage is robust to controlling for detailed characteristics of firms and owners, it holds in both high-tech and non-high-tech industries and, with the exception of productivity, it tends to be even stronger in firms owned by diverse immigrant-native teams and by diverse immigrants from different countries. The evidence from nearly all measures that immigrants tend to operate more innovative and productive firms, together with the higher share of business ownership by immigrants, implies large contributions to U.S. innovation and growth.
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Temperature and Local Industry Concentration
October 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-51
We use plant-level data from the US Census of Manufacturers to study the short and long run effects of temperature on manufacturing activity. We document that temperature shocks significantly increase energy costs and lower the productivity of small manufacturing plants, while large plants are mostly unaffected. In US counties that experienced higher increases in average temperatures between the 1980s and the 2010s, these heterogeneous effects have led to higher concentration of manufacturing activity within large plants, and a reallocation of labor from small to large manufacturing establishments. We offer a preliminary discussion of potential mechanisms explaining why large manufacturing firms might be better equipped for long-run adaptation to climate change, including their ability to hedge across locations, easier access to finance, and higher managerial skills.
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Noncitizen Coverage and Its Effects on U.S. Population Statistics
August 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-42
We produce population estimates with the same reference date, April 1, 2020, as the 2020 Census of Population and Housing by combining 31 types of administrative record (AR) and third-party sources, including several new to the Census Bureau with a focus on noncitizens. Our AR census national population estimate is higher than other Census Bureau official estimates: 1.8% greater than the 2020 Demographic Analysis high estimate, 3.0% more than the 2020 Census count, and 3.6% higher than the vintage-2020 Population Estimates Program estimate. Our analysis suggests that inclusion of more noncitizens, especially those with unknown legal status, explains the higher AR census estimate. About 19.8% of AR census noncitizens have addresses that cannot be linked to an address in the 2020 Census collection universe, compared to 5.7% of citizens, raising the possibility that the 2020 Census did not collect data for a significant fraction of noncitizens residing in the United States under the residency criteria used for the census. We show differences in estimates by age, sex, Hispanic origin, geography, and socioeconomic characteristics symptomatic of the differences in noncitizen coverage.
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Full Report of the Comparisons of Administrative Record Rosters to Census Self-Responses and NRFU Household Member Responses
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-08
One of the U.S. Census Bureau's innovations in the 2020 U.S. Census was the use of administrative records (AR) to create household rosters for enumerating some addresses when a self response was not available but high-quality ARs were. The goal was to reduce the cost of fieldwork during the Nonresponse Followup operation (NRFU). The original plan had NRFU beginning in mid-May and continuing through late July 2020. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the delay of NRFU and caused the Internal Revenue Service to postpone the income tax filing deadline, resulting in an interruption in the delivery of ARs to the U.S. Census Bureau. The delays were not anticipated when U.S. Census Bureau staff conducted the research on AR enumeration with the 2010 Census data in preparation for the 2020 Census or during the fine tuning of plans for using ARs during the 2018 End-to-End Census Test. These circumstances raised questions about whether the quality of the AR household rosters was high enough for use in enumeration. To aid in investigating the concern about the quality of the AR rosters, our analyses compared AR rosters to self-response rosters and NRFU household member responses at addresses where both ARs and a self-response were available.
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The Long-run Effects of the 1930s Redlining Maps on Children
December 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-56
We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps by linking children in the full count 1940 Census to 1) the universe of IRS tax data in 1974 and 1979 and 2) the long form 2000 Census. We use two identification strategies to estimate the potential long-run effects of differential access to credit along HOLC boundaries. The first strategy compares cross-boundary differences along HOLC boundaries to a comparison group of boundaries that had statistically similar pre-existing differences as the actual boundaries. A second approach only uses boundaries that were least likely to have been chosen by the HOLC based on our statistical model. We find that children living on the lower-graded side of HOLC boundaries had significantly lower levels of educational attainment, reduced income in adulthood, and lived in neighborhoods during adulthood characterized by lower educational attainment, higher poverty rates, and higher rates of single-headed households.
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Covering Undocumented Immigrants: The Effects of a Large-Scale Prenatal Care Intervention
August 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-28
Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for public insurance coverage for prenatal care in most states, despite their children representing a large fraction of births and having U.S. citizenship. In this paper, we examine a policy that expanded Medicaid pregnancy coverage to undocumented immigrants. Using a novel dataset that links California birth records to Census surveys, we identify siblings born to immigrant mothers before and after the policy. Implementing a mothers' fixed effects design, we find that the policy increased coverage for and use of prenatal care among pregnant immigrant women, and increased average gestation length and birth weight among their children.
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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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