Comparison of ASM Robot Data to LFTTD Robot Import Data

Erik Brynjolfsson, J. Frank Li, Javier Miranda, Robert Seamans and Andrew Wang

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

Abstract: This Technical Note describes the use of robot import data from the Longitudinal Foreign Trade Transactions Database (LFTTD) to verify the quality of responses to the robotics questions in the 2018 Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM). We find that the data we create from the robotics questions in the ASM are internally consistent, suggesting that the respondents had clarity about the questions. However, some issues surface from a comparison with the LFTTD data, potentially indicating respondent difficulty in answering questions, and/or differences in definition of a “robot†across the datasets, and/or obtaining robots from domestic re-sellers rather than importing them.

Keywords: ASM; LFTTD; LBDREV (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09
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