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Comparison of Child Reporting in the American Community Survey and Federal Income Tax Returns Based on California Birth Records
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-55
This paper takes advantage of administrative records from California, a state with a large child population and a significant historical undercount of children in Census Bureau data, dependent information in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 1040 records, and the American Community Survey to characterize undercounted children and compare child reporting. While IRS Form 1040 records offer potential utility for adjusting child undercounting in Census Bureau surveys, this analysis finds overlapping reporting issues among various demographic and economic groups. Specifically, older children, those of Non-Hispanic Black mothers and Hispanic mothers, children or parents with lower English proficiency, children whose mothers did not complete high school, and families with lower income-to-poverty ratio were less frequently reported in IRS 1040 records than other groups. Therefore, using IRS 1040 dependent records may have limitations for accurately representing populations with characteristics associated with the undercount of children in surveys.
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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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An In-Depth Examination of Requirements for Disclosure Risk Assessment
October 2023
Authors:
Ron Jarmin,
John M. Abowd,
Ian M. Schmutte,
Jerome P. Reiter,
Nathan Goldschlag,
Michael B. Hawes,
Robert Ashmead,
Ryan Cumings-Menon,
Sallie Ann Keller,
Daniel Kifer,
Philip Leclerc,
Rolando A. Rodr�guez,
Victoria A. Velkoff,
Pavel Zhuravlev
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-49
The use of formal privacy to protect the confidentiality of responses in the 2020 Decennial Census of Population and Housing has triggered renewed interest and debate over how to measure the disclosure risks and societal benefits of the published data products. Following long-established precedent in economics and statistics, we argue that any proposal for quantifying disclosure risk should be based on pre-specified, objective criteria. Such criteria should be used to compare methodologies to identify those with the most desirable properties. We illustrate this approach, using simple desiderata, to evaluate the absolute disclosure risk framework, the counterfactual framework underlying differential privacy, and prior-to-posterior comparisons. We conclude that satisfying all the desiderata is impossible, but counterfactual comparisons satisfy the most while absolute disclosure risk satisfies the fewest. Furthermore, we explain that many of the criticisms levied against differential privacy would be levied against any technology that is not equivalent to direct, unrestricted access to confidential data. Thus, more research is needed, but in the near-term, the counterfactual approach appears best-suited for privacy-utility analysis.
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Eviction and Poverty in American Cities
July 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-37
More than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them each year.
Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels are increasingly pursuing policies to reduce the number of evictions, citing harm to tenants and high public expenditures related to homelessness. We study the consequences of eviction for tenants using newly linked administrative data from two major urban areas: Cook County (which includes Chicago) and New York City. We document that prior to housing court, tenants experience declines in earnings and employment and increases in financial distress and hospital visits. These pre-trends pose a challenge for disentangling correlation and causation. To address this problem, we use an instrumental variables approach based on cases randomly assigned to judges of varying leniency. We find that an eviction order increases homelessness and hospital visits and reduces earnings, durable goods consumption, and access to credit in the first two years. Effects on housing and labor market outcomes are driven by impacts for female and Black tenants. In the longer-run, eviction increases indebtedness and reduces credit scores.
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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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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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Long-Run Adult Socio-economic Outcomes
from In Utero Airborne Lead Exposure
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-53
As a neurotoxin, early exposure to lead has long been assumed to affect socioeconomic out-comes well into adulthood. However, the empirical literature documenting such effects has been limited. This study documents the long-term effects of in utero exposure to air lead on adult socio-economic outcomes, including earnings, disabilities, employment, public assistance, and education, using US survey and administrative data. Specifically, we match individuals in the 2000 US Decennial Census and 2001-2014 American Community Surveys to average lead concentrations in the individual's birth county during his/her 9 months in utero. We find a 0.5 'g/m3 decrease in air lead, representing the average 1975-85 change resulting from the passage of the U.S. Clean Air Act, is associated with an increase in earnings of 3.5%, or a present value, at birth, of $21,400 in lifetime earnings. Decomposing this effect, we find greater exposure to lead in utero is associated with an increase in disabilities in adulthood, an increase in receiving public assistance, and a decrease in employment. Looking at effects by sex, long-term effects for girls seem to fall on participation in the formal labor market, whereas for boys it appears to fall more on hours worked. This is the first study to document such long-term effects from lead using US data. We estimate the present value in 2020, from all earnings impacts from 1975 forward, to be $4,230 Billion using a discount rate of 3%. In 2020 alone, the benefits are $252 B, or about 1.2% of GDP. Thus, our estimates imply the Clean Air Act's lead phase out is still returning a national dividend of over 1% every year.
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The Impact of Household Surveys on 2020 Census Self-Response
July 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-24
Households who were sampled in 2019 for the American Community Survey (ACS) had lower self-response rates to the 2020 Census. The magnitude varied from -1.5 percentage point for household sampled in January 2019 to -15.1 percent point for households sampled in December 2019. Similar effects are found for the Current Population Survey (CPS) as well.
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Determination of the 2020 U.S. Citizen Voting Age Population (CVAP) Using Administrative Records and Statistical Methodology Technical Report
October 2020
Authors:
John M. Abowd,
J. David Brown,
Lawrence Warren,
Moises Yi,
Misty L. Heggeness,
William R. Bell,
Michael B. Hawes,
Andrew Keller,
Vincent T. Mule Jr.,
Joseph L. Schafer,
Matthew Spence
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-33
This report documents the efforts of the Census Bureau's Citizen Voting-Age Population (CVAP) Internal Expert Panel (IEP) and Technical Working Group (TWG) toward the use of multiple data sources to produce block-level statistics on the citizen voting-age population for use in enforcing the Voting Rights Act. It describes the administrative, survey, and census data sources used, and the four approaches developed for combining these data to produce CVAP estimates. It also discusses other aspects of the estimation process, including how records were linked across the multiple data sources, and the measures taken to protect the confidentiality of the data.
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Understanding the Quality of Alternative Citizenship Data Sources for the 2020 Census
August 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-38R
This paper examines the quality of citizenship data in self-reported survey responses compared to administrative records and evaluates options for constructing an accurate count of resident U.S. citizens. Person-level discrepancies between survey-collected citizenship data and administrative records are more pervasive than previously reported in studies comparing survey and administrative data aggregates. Our results imply that survey-sourced citizenship data produce significantly lower estimates of the noncitizen share of the population than would be produced from currently available administrative records; both the survey-sourced and administrative data have shortcomings that could contribute to this difference. Our evidence is consistent with noncitizen respondents misreporting their own citizenship status and failing to report that of other household members. At the same time, currently available administrative records may miss some naturalizations and capture others with a delay. The evidence in this paper also suggests that adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census would lead to lower self-response rates in households potentially containing noncitizens, resulting in higher fieldwork costs and a lower-quality population count.
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