In most countries, national statistical agencies do not release establishment-level business microdata, because doing so represents too large a risk to establishments' confidentiality. One approach with the potential for overcoming these risks is to release synthetic data; that is, the released...

In the U.S. Census of Manufactures, the Census Bureau imputes missing values using a combination of mean imputation, ratio imputation, and conditional mean imputation. It is well-known that imputations based on these methods can result in underestimation of variability and potential bias in...

Federal statistics agencies strive to release data products that are informative for many purposes, yet also protect the privacy and confidentiality of data subjects’ identities and sensitive attributes. This article reviews the role that differential privacy, a disclosure risk criterion...

Adaptive Design methods for social surveys utilize the information from the data as it is collected to make decisions about the sampling design. In some cases, the decision is either to continue or stop the data collection. We evaluate this decision by proposing measures to compare the collected...

In the U.S. Census Bureau's 2002 and 2007 Censuses of Manufactures 79% and 73% of observations respectively have imputed data for at least one variable used to compute total factor productivity. The Bureau primarily imputes for missing values using mean-imputation methods which can reduce the...

We build up from the plant level an “aggregate(d) Solow residual" by estimating every U.S. manufacturing plant's contribution to the change in aggregate final demand between 1976 and 1996. We decompose these contributions into plant-level resource reallocations and plant-level technical...

Within-industry differences in measured plant-level productivity are large. A large literature has been devoted to explaining the causes and consequences of these differences. In the U.S. Census Bureau's manufacturing data, the Bureau imputes for missing values using methods known to result in...

We build up from the plant level an "aggregate(d)" Solow residual by estimating every U.S. manufacturing plant's contribution to the change in aggregate final demand between 1976 and 1996. Our framework uses the Petrin and Levinsohn (2010) definition of aggregate productivity growth, which...

Many statistical organizations collect data that are expected to satisfy linear constraints; as examples, component variables should sum to total variables, and ratios of pairs of variables should be bounded by expert-specified constants. When reported data violate constraints, organizations...