Decennial Employee - Employer Matched Databases (DEEDs)

MPRC faculty associate Judy Hellerstein (Economics), with David Neumark and colleagues, constructed new datasets based on a name and address match of long form (one-in-six) respondents in the 1990 and 2000 Decennial Censuses to their employers. The construction of these new matched data files, the 1990 and 2000 Decennial Employee-Employer Databases (DEEDs), is possible because on the long form of the Census, employed respondents reported the business address of their current primary employer. Hellerstein and her colleagues use this business address to match a worker to an employer, obtaining business addresses of employers from the Business Register (formerly known as the Standard Statistical Establishment List, or SSEL) for 2000, a master list at the Census Bureau of all business establishments in the U.S. The DEEDs contains, for every matched worker, information from the long form and information on the establishment in which that individual works. Similarly, information on every matched worker exists for every included establishment. The opportunity to compare and contrast the earnings and characteristics of employees working for the same employer at the same physical establishment provides one of the most unique features of the DEEDs.

The construction of the DEEDs was a major undertaking, using the name and address information written on the questionnaires by long form respondents. Hellerstein worked with the Census Bureau to develop sophisticated probabilistic matching algorithms that took into account the various spellings of street names and variations on addresses as well as dealing with issues of measurement error in two data sources. This dataset is now available through the Research Data Center network.

Hellerstein also made substantial progress on research associated with this project. Her paper (with David Neumark), "Production Function and Wage Equation Estimation with Heterogeneous Labor: Evidence from a New Matched Employer-Employee Data Set" is now forthcoming in a University of Chicago Press Volume. She and Neumark have also completed (and submitted to a peer-reviewed journal) an NBER working paper (11599) entitled, "Workplace Segregation in the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Skill.” Both of these papers use the 1990 DEED. Finally, Hellerstein, Neumark, and a graduate student Melissa McInerney recently completed a paper entitled, "Changes in Workplace Segregation in the United States: Evidence from the 1990 and 2000 Employer-Employee Datasets," which uses data from both the 1990 DEED and the beta-version of the 2000 DEED.