This paper reviews the literature in historical record linkage in the U.S. and examines the performance of widely-used automated record linking algorithms in two high-quality historical datasets and one synthetic ground truth. Focusing on algorithms in current practice, our findings highlight...

This study examines the impact of access to confidential administrative data on the rate, direction, and policy relevance of economics research. To study this question, we exploit the progressive geographic expansion of the U.S. Census Bureau's Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (FSRDCs)....

We introduce new historical administrative data identifying U.S. government-funded patents since the early twentieth century. In addition to the funding agency, the data report whether the government has title to the patent ("title" patents) or funded a patent assigned to a private organization...

Data stewards seeking to provide access to large-scale social science data face a difficult challenge. They have to share data in ways that protect privacy and confidentiality, are informative for many analyses and purposes, and are relatively straightforward to use by data analysts. We present...

We propose a method to correct estimates from historical linked data for bias arising from type-I error--"false matches." We estimate the rate of false matching from the disagreement rate in characteristics that should agree across the two linked datasets. Combined with an understanding of the...