The Federal statistical agencies have pressing needs to innovate in light of the rapidly changing structure of the economy and the interaction of these changes with the fundamental ways in which households and businesses produce and use information. We propose to create a ?research node? at the University of Michigan that will lever our distinctive strengths in social science, survey research, and information science to address the scientific and practical problems that the statistical system confronts. This project will advance the science of measurement and serve to renew the statistical system both by bringing frontier methodology to measurement problems faced by the statistical agencies and by cultivating a new generation of scholars who will collaboratively address these issues.
The broad theme of this proposal, integrating its four research projects, is the use of administrative data, and more generally, data generated by households and businesses in the course of their normal activities, to produce economic and demographic measurements that are now generated from surveys. Each project includes formal training of graduate and post-doctoral scholars in the methodological and substantive issues addressed in the research.
1. Frontiers of measurement: Linking survey and administrative data: The aim of this project is to understand how measurement is affected by pooling across multiple linkages of administrative records and surveys, and using administrative records for advancing survey measurement.
2. Frontiers of measurement: Mining the Web for economic measurement: This project will use computational techniques to demonstrate and implement real-time, web-based measurements of employment and business creation that can supplement, inform, and perhaps eventually replace survey-based measures.
3. SIPP Center: Mining the Gold Standard: This project will undertake research using the public use, synthetic, and ?Gold Standard? (restricted use) versions of the SIPP to study issues of program take up and household wellbeing in changing economy.
4. Linking geospatial and administrative data: Improving small area estimates: This project will develop techniques to use geospatial administrative data to improve estimates of population and migration for small geographic areas and small demographic groups.
Funding:
National Science Foundation
Funding Period:
10/01/2011 to 09/30/2018