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The Privacy-Protected Gridded Environmental Impacts Frame
December 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-74
This paper introduces the Gridded Environmental Impacts Frame (Gridded EIF), a novel privacy-protected dataset derived from the U.S. Census Bureau's confidential Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF) microdata infrastructure. The EIF combines comprehensive administrative records and survey data on the U.S. population with high-resolution geospatial information on environmental hazards. While access to the EIF is restricted due to the confidential nature of the underlying data, the Gridded EIF offers a broader research community the opportunity to glean insights from the data while preserving confidentiality. We describe the data and privacy protection process, and offer guidance on appropriate usage, presenting practical applications.
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Financing, Ownership, and Performance: A Novel, Longitudinal Firm-Level Database
December 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-73
The Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) underpins many studies of firm-level behavior. It tracks longitudinally all employers in the nonfarm private sector but lacks information about business financing and owner characteristics. We address this shortcoming by linking LBD observations to firm-level data drawn from several large Census Bureau surveys. The resulting Longitudinal Employer, Owner, and Financing (LEOF) database contains more than 3 million observations at the firm-year level with information about start-up financing, current financing, owner demographics, ownership structure, profitability, and owner aspirations ' all linked to annual firm-level employment data since the firm hired its first employee. Using the LEOF database, we document trends in owner demographics and financing patterns and investigate how these business characteristics relate to firm-level employment outcomes.
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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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Income, Wealth, and Environmental Inequality in the United States
October 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-57
This paper explores the relationships between air pollution, income, wealth, and race by combining administrative data from U.S. tax returns between 1979'2016, various measures of air pollution, and sociodemographic information from linked survey and administrative data. In the first year of our data, the relationship between income and ambient pollution levels nationally is approximately zero for both non-Hispanic White and Black individuals. However, at every single percentile of the national income distribution, Black individuals are exposed to, on average, higher levels of pollution than White individuals. By 2016, the relationship between income and air pollution had steepened, primarily for Black individuals, driven by changes in where rich and poor Black individuals live. We utilize quasi-random shocks to income to examine the causal effect of changes in income and wealth on pollution exposure over a five year horizon, finding that these income'pollution elasticities map closely to the values implied by our descriptive patterns. We calculate that Black-White differences in income can explain ~10 percent of the observed gap in air pollution levels in 2016.
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School Equalization in the Shadow of Jim Crow: Causes and Consequences of Resource Disparity in Mississippi circa 1940
May 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-25
A school finance equalization program established in Mississippi in 1920 failed to help many of the state's Black students'an outcome that was typical in the segregated U.S. South (Horace Mann Bond, 1934). In majority-Black school districts, local decision-makers overwhelmingly favored white schools when allotting funds from the state's preexisting per capita fund, and the resulting high expenditures on white students rendered these districts ineligible for the equalization program. Thus, while Black students residing in majority-white districts benefitted from increased spending and standards for Black schools, those in majority-Black districts continued to experience extremely low'and even worsening'school funding. We model the processes that led the so-called equalization policy to create disparities in schooling resources for Black students, and estimate effects on Black children using both a neighboring-counties design and an IV strategy. We find that local educational spending had large impacts on Black enrollment rates, as reported in the 1940 census, with Black educational attainment increasing in marginal spending. Finally, we link the 1940 and 2000 censuses to show that Black children exposed to higher levels of school expenditures had significantly more completed schooling and higher income late in life.
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Where Are Your Parents? Exploring Potential Bias in Administrative Records on Children
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-18
This paper examines potential bias in the Census Household Composition Key's (CHCK) probabilistic parent-child linkages. By linking CHCK data to the American Community Survey (ACS), we reveal disparities in parent-child linkages among specific demographic groups and find that characteristics of children that can and cannot be linked to the CHCK vary considerably from the larger population. In particular, we find that children from low-income, less educated households and of Hispanic origin are less likely to be linked to a mother or a father in the CHCK. We also highlight some data considerations when using the CHCK.
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The Long-Term Effects of Income for At-Risk Infants: Evidence from Supplemental Security Income
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-10
This paper examines whether a generous cash intervention early in life can "undo" some of the long-term disadvantage associated with poor health at birth. We use new linkages between several large-scale administrative datasets to examine the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of providing low-income families with low birthweight infants support through the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. This program uses a birthweight cutoff at 1200 grams to determine eligibility. We find that families of infants born just below this cutoff experience a large increase in cash benefits totaling about 27%of family income in the first three years of the infant's life. These cash benefits persist at lower amounts through age 10. Eligible infants also experience a small but statistically significant increase in Medicaid enrollment during childhood. We examine whether this support affects health care use and mortality in infancy, educational performance in high school, post-secondary school attendance and college degree attainment, and earnings, public assistance use, and mortality in young adulthood for all infants born in California to low-income families whose birthweight puts them near the cutoff. We also examine whether these payments had spillover effects onto the older siblings of these infants who may have also benefited from the increase in family resources. Despite the comprehensive nature of this early life intervention, we detect no improvements in any of the study outcomes, nor do we find improvements among the older siblings of these infants. These null effects persist across several subgroups and alternative model specifications, and, for some outcomes, our estimates are precise enough to rule out published estimates of the effect of early life cash transfers in other settings.
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The Changing Nature of Pollution, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the United States
January 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-04
This paper uses administrative tax records linked to Census demographic data and high-resolution measures of fine small particulate (PM2.5) exposure to study the evolution of the Black-White pollution exposure gap over the past 40 years. In doing so, we focus on the various ways in which income may have contributed to these changes using a statistical decomposition. We decompose the overall change in the Black-White PM2.5 exposure gap into (1) components that stem from rank-preserving compression in the overall pollution distribution and (2) changes that stem from a reordering of Black and White households within the pollution distribution. We find a significant narrowing of the Black-White PM2.5 exposure gap over this time period that is overwhelmingly driven by rank-preserving changes rather than positional changes. However, the relative positions of Black and White households at the upper end of the pollution distribution have meaningfully shifted in the most recent years.
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Estimating the U.S. Citizen Voting-Age Population (CVAP) Using Blended Survey Data, Administrative Record Data, and Modeling: Technical Report
April 2023
Authors:
J. David Brown,
Danielle H. Sandler,
Lawrence Warren,
Moises Yi,
Misty L. Heggeness,
Joseph L. Schafer,
Matthew Spence,
Marta Murray-Close,
Carl Lieberman,
Genevieve Denoeux,
Lauren Medina
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-21
This report develops a method using administrative records (AR) to fill in responses for nonresponding American Community Survey (ACS) housing units rather than adjusting survey weights to account for selection of a subset of nonresponding housing units for follow-up interviews and for nonresponse bias. The method also inserts AR and modeling in place of edits and imputations for ACS survey citizenship item nonresponses. We produce Citizen Voting-Age Population (CVAP) tabulations using this enhanced CVAP method and compare them to published estimates. The enhanced CVAP method produces a 0.74 percentage point lower citizen share, and it is 3.05 percentage points lower for voting-age Hispanics. The latter result can be partly explained by omissions of voting-age Hispanic noncitizens with unknown legal status from ACS household responses. Weight adjustments may be less effective at addressing nonresponse bias under those conditions.
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Building the Prototype Census Environmental Impacts Frame
April 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-20
The natural environment is central to all aspects of life, but efforts to quantify its influence have been hindered by data availability and measurement constraints. To mitigate some of these challenges, we introduce a new prototype of a microdata infras tructure: the Census Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF). The EIF provides detailed individual-level information on demographics, economic characteristics, and address level histories ' linked to spatially and temporally resolved estimates of environmental conditions for each individual ' for almost every resident in the United States over the past two decades. This linked microdata infrastructure provides a unique platform for advancing our understanding about the distribution of environmental amenities and hazards, when, how, and why exposures have evolved over time, and the consequences of environmental inequality and changing environmental conditions. We describe the construction of the EIF, explore issues of coverage and data quality, document patterns and trends in individual exposure to two correlated but distinct air pollutants as an application of the EIF, and discuss implications and opportunities for future research.
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