Business Dynamics Statistics: An Overview

Describes new measures of business dynamics at the economy-wide, broad industry, state, firm size, and firm age levels of aggregation. Outlines findings on the effects of business formation on employment growth and churn rates among young businesses

Understanding Database Reconstruction Attacks on Public Data

In 2020 the U.S. Census Bureau will conduct the Constitutionally mandated decennial Census of Population and Housing. Because a census involves collecting large amounts of private data under the promise of confidentiality, traditionally statistics are published only at high levels of aggregation. Published statistical tables are vulnerable to DRAs (database reconstruction attacks), in which the underlying microdata is recovered merely by finding a set of microdata that is consistent with the published statistical tabulations. A DRA can be performed by using the tables to create a set of mathematical constraints and then solving the resulting set of simultaneous equations. This article shows how such an attack can be addressed by adding noise to the published tabulations, so that the reconstruction no longer results in the original data

Civic Contributions: Taxes Paid by Immigrants in the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area

This report estimates the taxes paid by immigrants in the Washington, D.C., area in 1999-2000 and documents their demographics, household composition, income, and dispersal across jurisdictions in the region. The findings in this report are based mostly on analysis of 2000 U.S. Census data, because the census provides the most recent comprehensive data that allow disaggregation by country of origin groups and by many of the region's local jurisdictions. The demographic data in the report are updated through 2004 using the U.S. Current Population Survey. We calculate taxes at both the individual level (e.g., income and payroll taxes) and the household level (e.g., property taxes), but aggregate them up to the household level. Throughout the report we refer to households headed by immigrants (whether citizens, legal immigrants, or unauthorized migrants) as "immigrant households" and compare their incomes and tax payments to households headed by native-born U.S. citizens

Measuring inequality in a cross-tabulation with ordered categories: from the Gini coefficient to the Tog coefficient

This paper introduces the Tog coefficient, which can be used to measure the level of inequality in a cross-tabulation of two ordinal-level variables. The Gini coefficient is a standard measure of income inequality which has been adapted by other authors for use in different contexts such as the measurement of health inequalities and the quantification of occupational segregation; the Tog coefficient represents a further stage in this process of development. The paper outlines the construction of the Tog coefficient and illustrates this using a social mobility table based on data from the 1972 Oxford Mobility Study. The trend in social mobility-related inequality as measured by the Tog coefficient is compared with the findings of Goldthorpe et al. based on odds ratios. A more elaborate application of the Tog coefficient uses a variety of data relating to the similarity of spouses' class backgrounds to demonstrate the existence of a long-term decline in the level of inequality in British society

Understanding the Demand Side of the Low-Wage Labor Market

Presents findings from a survey of employers on their less-skilled labor needs: who hires whom and how; with what requirements, wages, benefits, results, and factors for promotion; and what policies would help job seekers without a college education

Is Welfare Reform Succeeding?

Welfare Reform and the Earned Income Tax Credit have apparently caused a dramatic increase in the labor force participation rates of single parents. Between the first quarters of 1994 and 1998, labor force participation rates rose 25.4 percent for never-married women caring for children, rose 15.5 percent for mothers separated from their spouse and rose 4.9 percent for divorced single mothers. By contrast, unmarried individuals and separated and divorced women who were not caring for children lowered their rates of participation in the labor market. The rise in the labor force participation rates of single parents between 1994 and 1998 increased the labor force by 1,111,000. The total increase in the labor force due to changes in participation rates was 1,178,000. Thus, single parents, who accounted for only 6.2 percent of the labor force in 1994, were responsible for almost all of the increase in the overall labor force participation rate between 1994 and 1998. This unanticipated increase in labor supply may be one of the reasons why wage inflation has been so moderate since 1992. The EITC and welfare reform have increased the level of output that is consistent with non-accelerating inflation and may have even shifted the NAIRU, though probably not by much

Changing Circumstances: Experiences of Child SSI Recipients Before and After Their Age-18 Redetermination for Adult Benefits

This paper provides an analysis of the dynamics of the transition of child Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients into adulthood using linked 2001-2002 National Survey of Children and Families (NSCF) survey and Social Security Administration (SSA) administrative data. We examine the interaction of impairment status, reported health needs, and other self-reported indicators of human capital on SSI program and employment outcomes after age 18. Our primary objective is to examine the differences in pre-age-18 individual characteristics across subgroups of recipients by impairment status and determine whether these differences influence post-age-18 SSI participation and employment outcomes. We find that after controlling for measures of disability severity, duration, and human capital, youth with other mental and behavioral disorders are much less likely to receive SSI at age 19. The findings also suggest that non-health factors, particularly education, employment, and social indicators, play an important role in the probability of a child SSI recipient being on adult SSI after age 18. Our findings indicate that, while some youth appear to be making a successful transition from child SSI benefits to adult benefits or other activities (off of SSI), others appear to have limited prospects for long-term self-sufficiency. A major concern is that some youth no longer on SSI after age 18, particularly those with other mental and behavioral disorders, may not have been sufficiently prepared for life without SSI and might not have enough human capital or other supports to become self-sufficient during their adult years

Do Historically Black Institutions of Higher Education Confer Unique Advantages on Black Students? An Initial Analysis

[Excerpt] Despite the declining relative importance of HBIs in the production of black bachelor\u27s degrees, in recent years they have become the subject of intense public policy debate for two reasons. First, court cases have been filed in a number of southern states that assert that black students continue to be underrepresented at traditionally white public institutions, that discriminatory admissions criteria are used by these institutions to exclude black students (e.g., basing admissions only on test scores and not also on grades), and that per student funding levels, program availability, and library facilities are substantially poorer at public HBIs than at other public institutions in these states (Johnson 1991). In one 1992 case, United States v. Fordice, the Supreme Court ruled that Mississippi had not done enough to eliminate racial segregation in its state-run higher educational institutions (Chira 1992). Rather than mandating a remedy, however, the Court sent the case back to the lower courts for action. What should the appropriate action be? Should it be to integrate more fully both the historically white and the historically black institutions by breaking down discriminatory admissions practices at the former and establishing some unique programs at the latter? Should the HBIs be eliminated and their campuses either folded into the historically white institutions or abandoned? Or should effort be directed at equalizing per student expenditure levels and facilities between campuses, rather than at worrying about the racial distribution of students at each campus, even if such policies might result in voluntary separate but equal institutions? From an economic efficiency perspective, the appropriate policy responses depend at least partially upon the answers to a number of questions: Do HBIs, per se, provide unique advantages to black students that they could not obtain at other institutions? If they do, is this because of the racial composition of their faculty or the racial composition of their students? If they do, would enrolling more black college students in higher expenditure per pupil integrated institutions actually leave these students in a worse position

Inequality and poverty in the United States: the effects of changing family behavior and rising wage dispersion

The trend toward increasing inequality in family income in the United States since the late 1960s is well documented. Among key possible explanations for this increase are rising dispersion in individual earnings, changes in female labor supply decisions, and changes in family composition and living arrangements. We analyze the contribution of these factors to changes in family income inequality and poverty during the years 1969-1998, focusing on labor supply and family structure as behavioral changes but accounting also for changes in the distribution of male earnings. Our analyses rely on conditionally weighted density estimation, a semiparametric decomposition technique recently developed by DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux (1996). We also use a relatively novel rank-based distributional exchange to assess the effects of changes in the distribution of male earnings. ; In our empirical work, we first analyze changes between 1969 and 1989, which corresponds roughly to the period of rising inequality that has been the focus of previous work. Our results indicate that rising dispersion of male earnings and the decline of traditional forms of family structure respectively explain up to about three-fourths and about one-half of rising inequality in family income during this period. The impact of changing family structure was most pronounced in the lower half of the distribution. In contrast, the increase in female labor force participation offset rising inequality to some degree, mainly in the upper half of the distribution, although its impact has moved down the distribution over time. In extending the analyses to the 1990s, we find that the rate at which inequality grew slowed after 1989, but the explanatory factors continued to have substantial effects. In each decade, the effects of the explanatory factors on poverty were especially large and followed a pattern similar to that for inequality.Poverty ; Income distribution ; Income