Synthetic microdata - data retaining the structure of original microdata while replacing original values with modeled values for the sake of privacy - presents an opportunity to increase access to useful microdata for data users while meeting the privacy and confidentiality requirements for data...

Statistical agencies have a dual mandate to provide accurate data and protect the privacy and confidentiality of data subjects. These mandates are fundamentally at odds and therefore must be balanced: more accurate data reduces privacy, while privacy protections introduce error that reduces...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic two new timely poverty measures have been developed to monitor fast-changing economic conditions for the most deprived. The Han et al. near real-time poverty measure uses responses to a global income question on the Monthly Current Population Survey (CPS)...

Income is simultaneously one of the most important variables used by economists and the variable most likely to be missing due to item non-response. While observations that are missing income responses are often dropped from analyses, such treatment is usually inappropriate. More appropriate...

National surveys are crucial for estimating key economic aggregates, including the unemployment rate, labor force participation, and household expenditures. The accuracy of these indicators is increasingly under scrutiny due to declining response rates and the consequent risk of nonresponse...

How high is unemployment? How low is labor force participation? Is obesity more prevalent among men? How large are household expenditures? We study the sources of the relevant official statistics--the Current Population Survey (CPS), the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), and...

When race is not directly observed, regulators and analysts commonly predict it using algorithms based on last name and address. In small business lending--where regulators assess fair lending law compliance using the Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) algorithm--we document large...

The Census Tree is the largest-ever database of record links among the historical U.S. censuses, with over 700 million links for people living in the United States between 1850 and 1940. These high-quality links allow researchers in the social sciences and other disciplines to construct a...

The United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) is arguably the most widely used alternative to gross domestic product for measuring national development. This is in large part due to its multidimensional nature, as it incorporates not only income, but also education and health. However, the...