Looking back on three years of Synthetic LBD Beta

Distributions of business data are typically much more skewed than those for household or individual data and public knowledge of the underlying units is greater. As a results, national statistical offices (NSOs) rarely release establishment or firm-level business microdata due to the risk to respondent confidentiality. One potential approach for overcoming these risks is to release synthetic data where the establishment data are simulated from statistical models designed to mimic the distributions of the real underlying microdata. The US Census Bureau\u27s Center for Economic Studies in collaboration with Duke University, the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, and Cornell University made available a synthetic public use file for the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) comprising more than 20 million records for all business establishment with paid employees dating back to 1976. The resulting product, dubbed the SynLBD, was released in 2010 and is the first-ever comprehensive business microdata set publicly released in the United States including data on establishments employment and payroll, birth and death years, and industrial classification. This paper documents the scope of projects that have requested and used the SynLBD

Intergenerational income and educational mobility in urban Chile

This paper provides evidence on the degree and patterns of intergenerational income and educational mobility in urban Chile. We find intergenerational income elasticities for Greater Santiago in Chile in the range of 0.52 to 0.54. This is lower than recent nation-wide elasticities for Chile of about 0.6-0.7, but still stands as fairly high in comparison with the comparable international evidence. We also find that intergenerational educational mobility is lower for the younger cohorts, which however does not necessarily imply an increase of intergenerational educational mobility in the last decades, as life-cycle effects may be at work. Finally, we find evidence of a higher degree of intergenerational persistence of income at the two extremes of the income distribution, which is more accentuated at the top centiles of the distribution. We suggest that this may mirror the unusually high concentration of income at the top of the income distribution in Chile, a hypothesis that requires further research.Intergenerational mobility, Schooling, Mobility patterns

Business Dynamics Statistics Briefing: Entrepreneurship Across States

Summarizes findings from new measures of business dynamics on the average percentage of jobs in each state that are created by young firms in 2000-05. Examines regional variations among states and explores correlations with average net employment growth

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

Business Dynamics Statistics Briefing: Jobs Created From Business Startups in the United States

Summarizes findings from new measures of business dynamics on jobs created by business start-ups in 1980-2005, compared with average annual net employment growth. Analyzes data by the start-ups' firm size

Expanding the Role of Synthetic Data at the U.S. Census Bureau

National Statistical offices (NSOs) create official statistics from data collected directly from survey respondents, from government administrative records and from other third party sources. The raw source data, regardless of origin, is usually considered to be confidential. In the case of the U.S. Census Bureau, confidentiality of survey and administrative records microdata is mandated by statute, and this mandate to protect confidentiality is often at odds with the needs of data users to extract as much information as possible from rich microdata. Traditional disclosure protection techniques applied to resolve this tension have resulted in official data products that come no where close to fully utilizing the information content of the underlying microdata. Typically, these products take for the form of basic, aggregate tabulations. In a few cases anonymized public-use micro samples are made available, but these are increasingly under risk of re-identification by the ever larger amounts of information about individuals and firms that is available in the public domain. One potential approach for overcoming these risks is to release products based on synthetic or partially synthetic data where values are simulated from statistical models designed to mimic the (joint) distributions of the underlying microdata rather than making the actual underlying microdata available. We discuss recent Census Bureau work to develop and deploy such products. We also discuss the benefits and challenges involved with extending the scope of synthetic data products in official statistics

Sentido e indeterminación en la cinta blanca, de Michael Haneke

_La cinta blanca narra una serie de acontecimientos inconexos e inexplicables, actos terribles que van generando una impresión de sinsentido, hechos violentos perpetrados contra víctimas inocentes o miembros "positivos". El análisi cinematográfico de esta película revela la importancia de la exclusión social de los niños en la sociedad austriaca de entreguerras como elemento que logra despejar el enigma del filme

A Scaling Law for L-Shell X-Ray Production Cross Sections Induced by Impact of 4He+, 9Be2+, and 14N2+ Ions

Experimental results of L-subshell X-ray production cross sections induced by the impact of several ions heavier than protons were compiled in order to propose possible scaling laws. The ions of interest in this work are 4He+, 9Be2+, and 14N2+. A feasible universal scaling for the x-ray production cross sections of the Lα (L3M4 + L3M5) line is based on a reduced velocity parameter ξRL1,2. In this scheme, the experimental data follow well resolved curves for each ion. A similar scaling for the Lγ line (L2N4 + L1N2 + L1N3+ L1O3 + L1O2 + L2N1 + L2O4) is also recommended, based on a different reduced velocity parameter ξRL1,2. These results appear to be useful for all the studied projectile-target combinations covered in this work, supporting the idea that more theoretical studies in this direction should be done. However, the behavior of the fitting does not seem to follow the previously observed one

Mud-Filtrate Invasion Modeling to Quantify Static and Dynamic Petrophysical Properties of Fractured and Vuggy Carbonate Formations

We develop and validate a new method to estimate secondary porosity and effective permeability of fractured and vuggy carbonate formations based on the numerical simulation of the process of mud-filtrate invasion. The method includes the geological characterization of core measurements and their integration with well logs and fluid production measurements. Applications of the new method are focused to the interpretation of data acquired in a carbonate reservoir in the Barinas-Apure Basin in southwest Venezuela, which is a triple-porosity system exhibiting inter-crystalline, intra-crystalline, moldic, vuggy (connected and non-connected) and fractured porosity, all embedded in a tight matrix. Rock-core data and image logs indicate that vugs are the mayor component of secondary porosity whereas fractures and interconnected vugs account for most of the permeability. The initial phase of our method consists of integrating core measurements with conventional and non-conventional well logs to calculate static and dynamic petrophysical properties via formation evaluation methods typically used to assess carbonate formations. Starting with the petrophysical variables calculated from standard formation-evaluation procedures, we simulate the process of invasion with both water- and oil-base muds. Resulting spatial distributions of water saturation and salt concentration give rise to spatial distributions of electrical resistivity which are used to calculate laterolog and induction logs. Comparison of simulated logs and measurements provides an effective means to assess whether the petrophysical properties calculated with standard interpretation methods are reliable. Specifically, if the calculated values of porosity and permeability are not correct the simulation of mud-filtrate invasion and resistivity logs will yield a poor match with measurements. In such cases, we update both variables until securing a good match between measurements and simulations. We find that permeability and porosity values estimated with our method reproduce values observed for the entire fluid-flow network system (well test data and core observations). Differences between simulations are measurements are diagnostic of presence of vugs and/or fractures. This procedure was tested on several key wells with and without core measurements, borehole images, and well-testing measurements. We conclusively find that our updated values of porosity and permeability are in very good agreement with the properties of the global petrophysical system. Differences between porosity and permeability values before and after simulation of the process of invasion are reliable indicators of presence and influence of vugs and/or fractures in the displacement of hydrocarbons by mud filtrate.Petroleum and Geosystems Engineerin