The Impact of Accounting Frauds on Labor Markets

Jung Ho Choi and Brandon Gipper

CES Technical Notes Series from Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau

Abstract: To identify and understand non-response in U.S. Census Bureau data, this technical note compares information about firms’ employment and wages in three different data sets from 1985 to 2014: S&P Compustat, the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), and the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD). Accounting fraud firms could be manipulating many data sources, including those related to employees or employee wages. As a result, firms could have divergent reporting patterns to Census programs, thus affecting the data quality in the LBD and LEHD. This technical note explores various analyses to better understand patterns of non-reporting and makes the following main contributions: (1) The note describes employee and payroll data across S&P Compustat, LBD, and LEHD. (2) The note describes firms that are in S&P Compustat that do not report data in the LEHD. (3) The note compares LEHD-reporting with LEHD-non-reporting firms, conducting t-tests of means across various size categories. (4) The note conducts a preliminary regression and t-test analysis of whether accounting-fraud firms appear to be more or less likely than other firms to report data to LEHD.

Keywords: Compustat; LBD; LEHD (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/tn/CES-TN-2023-07.pdf Abstract (application/pdf)
https://www.census.gov/about/adrm/ced/apply-for-access.html?CES-TN-2023-07 Confidential main document (application/pdf)
Researchers need to have obtained appropriate permissions.

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:tnotes:23-07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CES Technical Notes Series from Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Danielle H. Sandler ().