Scouting Out Data and Projects in the RDC

Example Projects Using Demographic,

Economic, or Business Data in the CRDC

Demographic Data

How Low Income Neighborhoods Change: Entry,

Exit and Enhancement

• Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine O'Regan

• Datasets: American Housing Survey, Decennial

• "This paper examines whether the economic gains

experienced by low-income neighborhoods in the

1990s followed patterns of classic gentrification (as

frequently assumed) - that is, through the in migration

of higher income white, households, and out migration

(or displacement) of the original lower income, usually

minority residents, spurring racial transition in the

process."

• Reason for needing restricted data: Tract IDs

Migration and Dispersal of Hispanic and Asian

Groups: An Analysis of the 2006-2008 Multiyear

American Community Survey

• William Frey and Julie Park

• Datasets: American Community Survey

• "This report seeks to evaluate selective migration

processes of Hispanic and Asian nationality groups in

the US from established settlement areas, using recent

migration data from the American Community Survey.

The underlying goal is to detect migration tendencies

leading toward an increased dispersion of these groups

associated with their migration processes."

• Reason for needing restricted data: Finer geography,

larger sample, detailed subgroups

The Location of New Orleans Residents in the

Year After Hurricane Katrina

• Narayan Sastry and Jesse Gregory

• Datasets: American Community Survey

• "Using individual data from the restricted version of the American Community Survey, we examined the displacement locations of pre-Katrina adult residents of New Orleans in the year after the hurricane. Over half (53%) of adults had returned to—or remained in—the New Orleans metropolitan area, with just under one- third of the total returning to the dwelling in which they resided prior to Katrina."

• Reason for needing restricted data: Location of previous residence one year ago

Intergenerational Transmission of Race:

Permeable Boundaries between 1970 and 2010

• Carolyn Liebler and Marie DeRousse-Wu

• Datasets: American Community Survey, Decennial

• "We study the social construction of race boundaries by investigating patterns in the race, ancestry, and Mexican origin responses provided for children of 14 types of interracial marriages using dense restricted- use data from 1970 to 2010. Our broader purpose is to expose social processes that convert a newborn child of mixed heritage into an adult person of a particular race."

• Reason for needing restricted data: Larger sample, detailed ancestry and race codes

Economic or Business Data

Capital and Labor Reallocation within Firms

• Xavier Giroud & Holger M. Mueller (2013)

• CRDC data: CMF, ASM, SSEL, Aux. Estab Survey (AES)

• Non-CRDC data: Airline routes (DOT), Compustat

• Question of how external and CRDC data -> CRDC data

"We document how a plant-specific shock to investment opportunities at one plant of a company ('treated plant') spills over to other plants of the same company but only if the company is Financially constrained. While the shock triggers an increase in investment and employment at the treated plant, this increase is offset by a decrease at other plants of approximately the same magnitude, which is consistent with headquarters channeling scarce resources away from other plants and toward the treated plant. As a result of the resource reallocation, firm-level productivity and firm value both increase, suggesting that the reallocation is overall efficient. We also show that in order to provide the treated plant with resources firms do not uniformly 'tax' all of their other plants in the same way. Precisely, firms are more likely to take away resources from plants that are less productive, are not part of the firm's core industries, and are located far away from headquarters. We do not find any investment or employment spillovers at financially unconstrained firms. "

Do Housing Prices Reflect Environmental Health

Risks? Evidence From More Than 1600 Toxic Plant

Openings And Closings • Janet Currie, Lucas Davis, Michael Greenstone, Reed Walker (2013)

• CRDC data: LBD

• Non-CRDC data: Housing prices, state micro-level vital statistics on births, toxic release inventories (EPA)

• Link everything by precise geocodes

"An ubiquitous and largely unquestioned assumption in studies of housing

markets is that there is perfect information about local amenities. This paper

measures the housing market and health impacts of 1,600 openings and

closings of industrial plants that emit toxic pollutants. We find that housing

values within one mile decrease by 1.5 percent when plants open, and

increase by 1.5 percent when plants close. This implies an aggregate loss in

housing values per plant of about 1.5 million. While the housing value

impacts are concentrated within mile, we find statistically significant infant

health impacts up to one mile away."

University Innovation, Local Economic Growth,

and Entrepreneurship

• Naomi Hausman (2012)

• CRDC data: LBD

• Non-CRDC data: Federal research funding data

• Question of how external data -> CRDC data

"Universities, often situated at the center of innovative clusters, are believed to be important drivers of local economic growth. This paper identifies the extent to which U.S. universities stimulate nearby economic activity using the interaction of a national shock to the spread of innovation from universities - the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 - with pre-determined variation both within a university in academic strengths and across universities in federal research funding. Using longitudinal establishment-level data from the Census, I find that long run employment and payroll per worker around universities rise particularly rapidly after Bayh-Dole in industries more closely related to local university innovative strengths. The impact of university innovation increases with geographic proximity to the university. Counties surrounding universities that received more pre -Bayh-Dole federal funding - particularly from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health - experienced faster employment growth after the law. Entering establishments - in particular multi-unit firm expansions - over the period from 1977 to 1997 were especially important in generating long-run employment growth, while incumbents experienced modest declines, consistent with creative destruction. Suggestive of their complementarities with universities, large establishments contributed more substantially to the total 20 - year growth effect than did small establishments. "

Do Environmental Regulations Disproportionately

Affect Small Businesses? Evidence from the

Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures Survey

• Randy A Becker, Carl Pasurka, Ronald J Shadbegian (2012)

• CRDC data: PACE, ASM, CMF

• Non-CRDC data: (none)

• Policy question using just CRDC data

"It remains an open question whether the impact of environmental regulations differs by the size of the business. Such differences might be expected because of statutory, enforcement, and/or compliance asymmetries. Here, we consider the net effect of these three asymmetries, by estimating the relationship between plant size and pollution abatement expenditures, using establishment-level data on U.S. manufacturers from the Census Bureaus Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures (PACE) surveys of 1974-1982, 1984-1986, 1988-1994, 1999, and 2005, combined with data from the Annual Survey of Manufactures and Census of Manufactures. We model establishments PAOC intensity - that is, their pollution abatement operating costs per unit of economic activity - as a function of establishment size, industry, and year. Our results show that PAOC intensity increases with establishment size. We also find that larger firms spend more per unit of output than do smaller firms. "

Do SBA Loans Create Jobs? Estimates from Universal

Panel Data and Longitudinal Matching Methods

• J David Brown, John S Earle (2012)

• CRDC data: LBD

• Non-CRDC data: SBA loan data

• Policy question of how external data -> CRDC data "This paper reports estimates of the effects of the Small Business Administration (SBA) 7(a) and 504 loan programs on employment. The database links a complete list of all SBA loans in these programs to universal data on all employers in the U.S. economy from 1976 to 2010. Our method is to estimate firm fixed effect regressions using matched control groups for the SBA loan recipients we have constructed by matching exactly on firm age, industry, year, and pre-loan size, plus kernel-based matching on propensity scores estimated as a function of four years of employment history and other variables. The results imply positive average effects on loan recipient employment of about 25 percent or 3 jobs at the mean. Including loan amount, we find little or no impact of loan receipt per se, but an increase of about 5.4 jobs for each million dollars of loans. When focusing on loan recipients and control firms located in high-growth counties (average growth of 22 percent), places where most small firms should have excellent growth potential, we find similar effects, implying that the estimates are not driven by differential demand conditions across firms. Results are also similar regardless of distance of control from recipient firms, suggesting only a very small role for displacement effects. In all these cases, the results pass a "pre-program" specification test, where controls and treated firms look similar in the pre-loan period. Other specifications, such as those using only matching or only regression imply somewhat higher effects, but they fail the pre-program test. "

Previous and Current Projects in the

RDC

• CES Discussion Paper Series

- Every Census-based project in the RDC submits

a working paper to the CES Discussion Paper

Series

- These papers are downloadable in PDF format

- http://ideas.repec.org/s/cen/wpaper.html

• NCHS Publications

- The NCHS RDC website provides a list of all

publications that have come out of NCHS

projects conducted in the RDC by dataset

- http://www.cdc.gov/rdc/B6Pubeyond/Pub611.htm

Exploring the Mendeley

Database • The TXCRDC research staff have provided

a database that indexes the CES Working

Papers by the dataset used

• Follow our Mendeley database by

creating an account and joining our group

• You can search for papers by dataset to

see what other people have done with

the data that you are interested in

• http://www.mendeley.com/library/

Scouting out Census Data

• To find out about Census datasets, visit the CES website where datasets are categorized by type (demographic, economic, etc) • https://www.census.gov/ces/dataproducts/re

stricted_data.html

• AND talk to the TXCRDC Admin, Bethany DeSalvo

Scouting out NCHS Data

• NCHS provides descriptions and

codebooks for most of their datasets

on their website

• http://www.cdc.gov/rdc/b1datatype/dt122.

htm

• AND talk to the TXCRDC Admin,

Bethany DeSalvo

The RDC Computing Environment

Overview

• Examples of software and file manipulation in the RDC

• Thin Client User Guide

• Screenshots from the (former) Virtual RDC, which was housed at Cornell

STATA, SAS, and R

Essential statistical software looks very

similar to Windows and OS

Questions?