-
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.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Impact of Unemployment Insurance Extensions On Disability Insurance Application and Allowance Rates
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-10
Both unemployment insurance (UI) extensions and the availability of disability benefits have disincentive effects on job search. But UI extensions can reduce the efficiency cost of disability benefits if UI recipients delay disability application until they exhaust their unemployment benefits. This paper, the first to focus on the effect of UI extensions on disability applications, investigates whether UI eligibility, extension, and exhaustion affect the timing of disability applications and the composition of the applicant pool. Jobless individuals are significantly less likely to apply to Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) during UI extensions, and significantly more likely to apply when UI is ultimately exhausted. Healthier potential applicants appear more likely to delay, as state allowance rates increase after a new UI extension. Simulations find that a 13-week UI extension decreases SSDI and Medicare costs, offsetting about half of the increase in UI payments; this suggests that the benefits of UI extensions may be understated ' permanent disability benefits are diverted to shorter-run unemployment benefits and, potentially, new jobs, while easing the burden on the nearly insolvent SSDI Trust Fund.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Black-White Differences in Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the U.S.
December 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-40
Traditional measures of intergenerational mobility such as the intergenerational elasticity are not useful for inferences concerning group differences in mobility with respect to the pooled income distribution. This paper uses transition probabilities and measures of 'directional rank mobility' that can identify inter-racial differences in intergenerational mobility. The study uses two data sources including one that contains social security earnings for a large intergenerational sample. I find that recent cohorts of blacks are not only significantly less upwardly mobile but also significantly more downwardly mobile than whites. This implies a steady-state distribution in which there is no racial convergence in income. A descriptive analysis using covariates reveals that test scores in adolescence can explain much of the racial difference in both upward and downward mobility. Family structure can account for some of the racial gap in upward mobility but not downward mobility. Completed schooling and parental wealth also appear to account for some of the racial gaps in intergenerational mobility.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Long-Run Earnings Volatility and Health Insurance Coverage: Evidence from the SIPP Gold Standard File
October 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-35
Despite the notable increase in earnings volatility and the attention paid to the growing ranks of the uninsured, the relationship between career earnings and short- and mediumrun health insurance status has been ignored due to a lack of data. I use a new dataset, the SIPP Gold Standard File, that merges health insurance status and demographics from the Survey of Income and Program Participation with career earnings records from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to examine the relationship between long-run family earnings volatility and health insurance coverage. I find that more volatile career earnings are associated with an increased probability of experiencing an uninsured episode, with larger effects for men, young workers, and the unmarried. These findings are consistent with the 'scarring' literature, and suggest the importance of safety-net measures for job losses and health insurance coverage.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Parental Earnings and Children's Well-Being and Future Success: An Analysis of the SIPP Matched to SSA Earnings Data
April 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-12
We estimate the association between parental earnings and a wide variety of indicators of child well-being using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) matched to administrative earnings records from the Social Security Administration. We find that the use of longer time averages of parent earnings leads to substantially higher estimated effects compared to using only a single year of parent earnings. This suggests that previous studies may have understated the potential efficacy of income support programs to improve child well-being. Further, policy makers should take into account the attenuation bias when comparing studies that use different time spans to measure parental income. Using 7 year time averages of parent earnings, we show for example, that a doubling of parent earnings reduces the probability of a teenager reporting being in poor health by close to 50 percent and a child having insufficient food by 75 percent.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Are the Lasting Effects of Employee-Employer Separations induced by Layoff and Disability Similar? Exploring Job Displacement using Survey and Administrative Data
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
tp-2005-03
This paper integrates the existing literatures on displacement and health by examining the enduring
effects of job dislocations that are induced by firm and individual shocks to employment. A joint estimation of
hourly wage rates and weekly hours illuminates the disparities in these economic outcomes
that exist between those who have reestablished themselves in the workplace subsequent to a layoff and
those who have returned to work following the onset of a disability relative to those with uninterrupted
job histories. As an extension of these ideas, employment transitions and workplace adjustments are
modeled to capture spousal reactions to these shocks. Multiple indicators of health from the Survey of
Income and Program Participation and Social Security Administrative benefits records are incorporated
into the analyses of those with impairments that prompted job loss. These measures allow knowledge
to be gleaned regarding the qualitative di'erences in the lasting impacts of job cessation resulting from
medically diagnosed illnesses as compared to estimates uncovered using survey data sources alone. By
considering time durations following these periods of separation in light of these indicators of well-being,
a more comprehensive understanding of the long-run repercussions of employee-employer separation is
acquired.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
New Approaches to Confidentiality Protection Synthetic Data, Remote Access and Research Data Centers
June 2004
Working Paper Number:
tp-2004-03
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Mis-Measurement of Permanent Earnings: New Evidence from Social Security Earnings Data
May 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-12
This study investigates the reliability of using short-term averages of earnings as a proxy for permanent earnings in empirical research. An earnings dynamics model is estimated on a large sample of men covering the period from 1983 to 1997 following the cohort-based methodology of Baker and Solon (1999). The analysis uses a unique dataset that matches men in the 1984, 1990 and 1996 Surveys of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to the Social Security Administration's Summary Earnings Records (SER). The results confirm that using a short-term average of earnings can lead to spurious estimates of the effect of lifetime earnings on a particular outcome. In addition, the transitory variance appears to vary considerably over the lifecycle. The share of earnings variance due to transitory factors is higher among blacks and the persistence of transitory shocks appears to be greater for this group as well. Finally, the transitory variance appears to be a more important factor in explaining the overall earnings variance of college educated men than those without college.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Earnings Mobility in the US: A New Look at Intergenerational Inequality
May 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-11
This study uses a new data set that contains the Social Security earnings histories of parents and children in the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation, to measure the intergenerational elasticity in earnings in the United States. Earlier studies that found an intergenerational elasticity of 0.4 have typically used only up to five-year averages of fathers' earnings to measure fathers' permanent earnings. However, dynamic earnings models that allow for serial correlation in transitory shocks to earnings imply that using such a short time span may lead to estimates that are biased down by nearly 30 percent. Indeed, by using many more years of fathers' earnings than earlier studies, the intergenerational elasticity between fathers and sons is estimated to be around 0.6 implying significantly less mobility in the U.S. than previous research indicated. The elasticity in earnings between fathers and daughters is of a similar magnitude. The evidence also suggests that family income has an even larger effect than fathers' earnings on children's future labor market success. The elasticity of earnings is higher for families with low net worth, offering some empirical support for theoretical models that predict differences due to borrowing constraints. Some evidence of a higher elasticity among blacks is found but the results are not conclusive.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Redistribution in the Current U.S. Social Security System
April 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-09
Because its benefit formula replaces a greater fraction of the lifetime earnings of lower earners than of higher earnings, Social Security is generally thought to be progressive, providing a 'better deal' to low earners in a cohort than to high earners. However, much of the intra-cohort redistribution in the U.S. Social Security system is related to factors other than lifetime income. Social Security transfers income from people with low life expectancies to people with high life expectancies, from single workers and from married couples with substantial earnings by the secondary earner to married one-earner couples, and from people who work for more than 35 years to those who concentrate their earnings in 35 or fewer years. This paper studies the redistribution accomplished in the retirement portion of the current U.S. Social Security system using a microsimulation model built around a match of the 1990 and 1991 Surveys of Income and Program Participation to Social Security administrative earnings and benefit records. The model simulates the distribution of internal rates of returns, net transfers, and lifetime net tax rates from Social Security that would have been received by members of the 1925 to 1929 birth cohorts if they had lived under current Social Security rules for their entire lives. The paper finds that annual income-related transfers from Social Security are only 5 to 9 percent of Social Security benefits paid, or $19 to $34 billion, at 2001 aggregate benefits levels, when taxes and benefits are discounted at the cohort rate of return of 1.29 percent. At higher discount rates, Social Security appears to be more redistributive by some measures, and less redistributive by others. Because much of the redistribution that occurs through Social Security is not related to income, the range of transfers received at a given level of lifetime income is quite wide. For example, 19 percent of individuals in the top lifetime income quintile receive net transfers that are greater than the average transfer for people in the lowest lifetime income quintile.
View Full
Paper PDF
