Automating Response Evaluation for Franchising Questions on the 2017 Economic Census

Joseph Staudt, Yifang Wei, Lisa Singh, Shawn Klimek (), J. Jensen () and Andrew L. Baer

No 25818, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Between the 2007 and 2012 Economic Censuses (EC), the count of franchise-affiliated establishments declined by 9.8%. One reason for this decline was a reduction in resources that the Census Bureau was able to dedicate to the manual evaluation of survey responses in the franchise section of the EC. Extensive manual evaluation in 2007 resulted in many establishments, whose survey forms indicated they were not franchise-affiliated, being recoded as franchise-affiliated. No such evaluation could be undertaken in 2012. In this paper, we examine the potential of using external data harvested from the web in combination with machine learning methods to automate the process of evaluating responses to the franchise section of the 2017 EC. Our method allows us to quickly and accurately identify and recode establishments have been mistakenly classified as not being franchise-affiliated, increasing the unweighted number of franchise-affiliated establishments in the 2017 EC by 22%-42%.

JEL-codes: C81 L8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-big, nep-cmp and nep-ore
Note: TWP
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Published as Automating Response Evaluation for Franchising Questions on the 2017 Economic Census , Joseph Staudt, Yifang Wei, Lisa Singh, Shawn Klimek, J. Bradford Jensen, Andrew Baer. in Big Data for Twenty-First-Century Economic Statistics , Abraham, Jarmin, Moyer, and Shapiro. 2022

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Chapter: Automating Response Evaluation for Franchising Questions on the 2017 Economic Census (2019)
Working Paper: Automating Response Evaluation For Franchising Questions On The 2017 Economic Census (2019)
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