The Sensitivity of Economic Statistics to Coding Errors in Personal Identifiers

John M. Abowd and Lars Vilhuber ()

Technical Papers from Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau

Abstract: In this paper, we describe the sensitivity of small-cell flow statistics to coding errors in the identity of the underlying entities. Specifically, we present results based on a comparison of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) before and after correcting for such errors in SSN-based identifiers in the underlying individual wage records. The correction used involves a novel application of existing statistical matching techniques. It is found that even a very conservative correction procedure has a sizable impact on the statistics. The average bias ranges from 0.25 percent up to 15 percent for flow statistics, and up to 5 percent for payroll aggregates.

Keywords: Flow statistics; Probabilistic matching; Transitions; Tenure; Job flows; Job creation; QWI (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-10, Revised 2003-03
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Published in Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, April 2005, pages 133-152.

Downloads: (external link)
http://lehd.did.census.gov/led/library/techpapers/tp-2002-17.pdf Revised version, 2003 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Sensitivity of Economic Statistics to Coding Errors in Personal Identifiers (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:tpaper:2002-17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Technical Papers from Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Sang V. Nguyen ().