Time-use researchers are typically interested in the time use of individuals, but time use data are samples of person-days. Given day-to-day variation in how people spend their time, this distinction is analytically important. We examine the conditions necessary to make inferences about the time...

This paper examines seasonal differences in monthly employment figures gathered from two Bureau of Labor Statistics programs. One is the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), which is based on mandatory quarterly Unemployment Insurance reports; the other is the Current Employment...

This paper constructs, for the five largest cities in the United States, user costs and rents for the same structure, in levels (i.e., measured in dollars). The levels formulation is a major advantage over indexes since one can answer questions like "Is it cheaper to rent or to own?" or "Are...

In accordance with Executive Order 13078, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in cooperation with the Employment Rate Measurement Methodology interagency workgroup, identified the goal of placing a small set of questions within the Current Population Survey (CPS) to measure disability. A set of...

This paper demonstrates that, in the context of U.S. housing data, rents and ex ante user costs diverge markedly—in both growth rates and levels—for extended periods of time, a seeming failure of arbitrage and a puzzle from the perspective of standard capital theory. The tremendous...

Between 1999 and 2006, there were two episodes during which inflation in the Rent index in the CPI diverged markedly from inflation in the index for Owner’s Equivalent Rent (OER); early in 2007, these series began to diverge again. Such divergence often prompts many to question CPI methods. A...

Labor economists have long used occupation indicators as a proxy for unobserved skills that a worker possesses. In this paper, we consider whether inter-occupational wage differentials that are unexplained by measured human capital are indeed due to differences in often-unmeasured skill. Using...

The Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey began imputing income in its 2004 data. Imputation predicts income for households that reported receiving income but failed to report a specific value. In this study, I examine how income imputation affects analysis of the CE expenditure data. Most...

This paper proposes a detailed, consistent category system for occupations in the Census of Population data from 1960 to 2000. Most of the categories are based on the 1990 Census occupation definitions. We analyze employment levels, average earnings levels, and earnings variance in our...

As a rental unit ages, its quality typically falls; a failure to correct for this would result in downward bias in the CPI. We investigate the BLS age bias imputation and explore two potential categories of error: approximations related to the construction of the age bias factor, and model...