Abstract
Steve Woodruff (1996) "Predicting
Births In The Current Employment Statistics Survey," Proceedings
of the Section on Survey Research Methods, American Statistical
Association.
The Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey is a
monthly survey of about 400,000 business establishments. It
is used to estimate total national non-farm employment and
other economic statistics. The universe for this survey is
known as the ES-202 and is constantly changing due to some
establishments going out of business and others starting up.
An establishment is defined as an Unemployment Insurance (UI)
account on the ES-202 file. The effect of these births (new
UI accounts) and deaths (UI accounts that stop reporting)
remains an important source of non-sampling error. Karlin's
book "A First Course in Stochastic Processes"
,1972, outlines several "Birth and Death Processes"
that may describe these changes in the ES-202. Karlin's
outline describes birth and death processes without regard to
model fitting or parameter estimation. This paper describes
maximum likelihood, minimum statistical distance, and
nonlinear regression estimators for birth and death process
parameters. Historical ES-202 data up to some time point are
used for parameter estimation in a birth and death model and
this model is used to predict the number of births that occur
for the next few months after this time point. These
predictions are compared to births on the ES-202 file and
these comparisons are repeated for a variety of time periods,
industries, and size classes.
KEY WORDS: Birth and Death Process, Maximum Likelihood,
Minimum Distance, Nonlinear Regression
Last Modified Date: July 19, 2008
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