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Extending Place-Based Innovation Policy to Rural Areas: Using Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition to Identify Endowment Deficiencies
July 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-48
Place-based policy is premised on the idea that productive investments that address endowment deficiencies may release latent comparative advantages, stimulating growth while reducing regional disparities. Extending place-based policy to the domain of innovation is conceptually challenging given conventional wisdom that settlement size is the principal determinant of agglomeration economies that fuels innovation. However, growing concern that more places are being left behind by the innovation economy has prompted greater interest in ways to expand the geography of innovation. Using confidential firm-level data from the 2018 Annual Business Survey, this study examines differences in self-reported innovation activity between firms in rural and urban counties to identify possible endowment deficiencies. We do this by employing the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method to quantify the urban-rural innovation gap to better understand the relative contributions of firm characteristics, owner characteristics, and county-level factors.
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Access to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) at the State and Substate Levels: Meaning and Measurement
July 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-44
This study estimates eligibility and access rates for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) administrative data linked with American Community Survey (ACS) data. This study is one result of a long-term research collaboration among USDA's Economic Research Service; the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census; USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS); and participating state WIC agencies.'By analyzing WIC participation at the state and substate levels, the report provides insights into program reach and demographic differences. The findings confirm that the Census Bureau estimates meet high statistical reliability standards, providing valuable data for program officials and managers, and other stakeholders, to enhance program outreach and effectiveness. A key focus of the report is the comparison between Census Bureau and USDA, FNS estimates, which differ in methodology and measurement scope.
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Integrating Administrative and Survey Data to Estimate WIC Eligibility and Access
July 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-43
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides benefits to low-income, nutritionally at-risk women, infants, and children. To administer WIC, officials and program managers at the federal and state level want to understand who is eligible for the program, who among the eligible population chooses to participate, and who is not accessing the program despite their eligibility. Novel individual-level data linkages between restricted-use WIC Administrative Records and the American Community Survey provide WIC access rates estimated at the state and county levels, as well as estimates disaggregated by the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of individuals and their households. These estimates are developed by the Census-FNS-ERS Joint Project, a research partnership among the U.S. Census Bureau, the US Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service and Economic Research Service, and state WIC agencies that provide the requisite WIC administrative data to the Census Bureau. This paper details and evaluates our current data linkage and estimation methods, reports results, and identifies areas for improvement and further research.
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The Hidden Costs of Decline: Health Disparities in America's Diminishing Micropolitan Areas
September 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-70
This study examines the relationship between long-term population change and health outcomes in U.S. micropolitan areas, with a focus on life expectancy and mortality disparities. Using a county typology based on the historical population trajectories of micropolitan cores from 1940 to 2020, this analysis reveals that health outcomes are substantially worse in places that experienced sustained decline. These disparities persist even after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, suggesting that population loss itself is a key driver of poor public health. Declining micropolitan areas are older, less educated, and report high rates of behavioral risk factors, including smoking, excessive drinking, and physical inactivity. By linking historical demographic trends to tract-level data, this analysis highlights the distinct challenges facing the urban cores of shrinking micropolitan areas. Population decline emerges not only as a demographic trend, but as a marker of structural disadvantage with measurable consequences for community health.
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Tip of the Iceberg: Tip Reporting at U.S. Restaurants, 2005-2018
November 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-68
Tipping is a significant form of compensation for many restaurant jobs, but it is poorly measured and therefore not well understood. We combine several large administrative and survey datasets and document patterns in tip reporting that are consistent with systematic under-reporting of tip income. Our analysis indicates that although the vast majority of tipped workers do report earning some tips, the dollar value of tips is under-reported and is sensitive to reporting incentives. In total, we estimate that about eight billion in tips paid at full-service, single-location, restaurants were not captured in tax data annually over the period 2005-2018. Due to changes in payment methods and reporting incentives, tip reporting has increased over time. Our findings have implications for downstream measures dependent on accurate measures of compensation including poverty measurement among tipped restaurant workers.
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Measuring School Economic Disadvantage
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-50R
Many educational policies hinge on the valid measurement of student economic disadvantage at the school level. Measures based on free and reduced-price lunch enrollment are used widely. However, recent research raises questions about their reliability, particularly following the introduction of universal free lunch in certain schools and districts. Using unique data linking the universe of students in Oregon public schools to IRS tax records and other data housed at the U.S. Census Bureau, we provide the first examination of how well different measures capture school economic disadvantage. We find that, in Oregon, direct certification provides the best widely-available measure, both over time and across the distribution of school economic disadvantage. By contrast, neighborhood-based measures consistently perform relatively poorly.
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An Examination of the Informational Value of Self-Reported Innovation Questions
October 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-46
Self-reported innovation measures provide an alternative means for examining the economic performance of firms or regions. While European researchers have been exploiting the data from the Community Innovation Survey for over two decades, uptake of US innovation data has been much slower. This paper uses a restricted innovation survey designed to differentiate incremental innovators from more far-ranging innovators and compares it to responses in the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs (ASE) and the Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) to examine the informational value of these positive innovation measures. The analysis begins by examining the association between the incremental innovation measure in the Rural Establishment Innovation Survey (REIS) and a measure of the inter-industry buying and selling complexity. A parallel analysis using BRDIS and ASE reveals such an association may vary among surveys, providing additional insight on the informational value of various innovation profiles available in self-reported innovation surveys.
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Small Business Pulse Survey Estimates by Owner Characteristics and Rural/Urban Designation
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-24
In response to requests from policymakers for additional context for Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS) measures of the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses, we researched developing estimates by owner characteristics and rural/urban locations. Leveraging geographic coding on the Business Register, we create estimates of the effect of the pandemic on small businesses by urban and rural designations. A more challenging exercise entails linking micro-level data from the SBPS with ownership data from the Annual Business Survey (ABS) to create estimates of the effect of the pandemic on small businesses by owner race, sex, ethnicity, and veteran status. Given important differences in survey design and concerns about nonresponse bias, we face significant challenges in producing estimates for owner demographics. We discuss our attempts to meet these challenges and provide discussion about caution that must be used in interpreting the results. The estimates produced for this paper are available for download. Reflecting the Census Bureau's commitment to scientific inquiry and transparency, the micro data from the SBPS will be available to qualified researchers on approved projects in the Federal Statistical Research Data Center network.
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Business Dynamics on American Indian Reservations: Evidence from Longitudinal Datasets
November 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-38
We use confidential US Census Bureau data to analyze the difference in business establishment dynamics by geographic location on or off of American Indian reservations over the period of the Great Recession, and subsequent recovery (2007-2016). We geocoded U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database, a dataset with records of all employer business establishments in the U.S. for location in an American Indian Reservation and used it to examine whether there are differences in business establishment survival rates over time by virtue of their location. We find that business establishments located on American Indian reservations have higher survival rates than establishments located in comparable counties. These results are particularly strong for the education, arts and entertainment, wholesale and retail, and public administration industries. While we are not fully able to explain this result, it is consistent with the business establishments being positively selected with respect to survival given the large obstacles necessary to start a business on a reservation in the first place. Alternatively, there may be certain safeguards in a reservation economy that protect business establishments from external economic shocks.
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Measuring the Effect of COVID-19 on U.S. Small Businesses: The Small Business Pulse Survey
May 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-16
In response to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the Census Bureau developed and fielded an entirely new survey intended to measure the effect on small businesses. The Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS) will run weekly from April 26 to June 27, 2020. Results from the SBPS will be published weekly through a visualization tool with downloadable data. We describe the motivation for SBPS, summarize how the content for the survey was developed, and discuss some of the initial results from the survey. We also describe future plans for the SBPS collections and for our research using the SBPS data. Estimates from the first week of the SBPS indicate large to moderate negative effects of COVID-19 on small businesses, and yet the majority expect to return to usual level of operations within the next six months. Reflecting the Census Bureau's commitment to scientific inquiry and transparency, the micro data from the SBPS will be available to qualified researchers on approved projects in the Federal Statistical Research Data Center network.
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