Speaker: Bruce D. Spencer and Zachary H. Seeskin
Title: Measuring Benefits from Improving Accuracy of the 2020 Census: Apportionment of the U.S. House of Representatives and Allocation of Federal Funds
Abstract: In order to know how much accuracy is needed for the 2020 Census – with the appreciation that accuracy is expensive – we need to understand how the census results get used. In this talk, we consider two high profile uses of the census: apportionment and fund allocation. Apportionment of the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives is based on census numbers, and distortions in the census results lead to distortions in numbers of seats allocated to the states. We expect that roughly $5 trillion in federal grant and direct assistance monies will be distributed at least partly on the basis of population and income data following the 2020 census, and distortions in census results cause distortions in the allocations of funds. We present loss functions to quantify the distortions in apportionment and fund allocations, and we describe empirical analyses to estimate the expected loss arising from alternative profiles of accuracy in state population numbers.(archived presentation)
Location:
- Carnegie Mellon: contact William Eddy (bill@cmu.edu)
- Census Bureau headquarters: Room 1, contact Nancy Bates (nancy.a.bates@census.gov)
- Cornell University, Ithaca campus: Ives 109, contact Lars Vilhuber (lars.vilhuber@cornell.edu)
- Duke University: contact Jerry Reiter (jerry@stat.duke.edu)
- University of Michigan: Room 3443 ISR-Thompson, contact Maggie Levenstein (maggiel@umich.edu)
- University of Missouri: contact Scott Holan (holans@missouri.edu)
- University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Room TBD: contact: Allan McCutcheon (amccutcheon1@unl.edu)
- Northwestern University: contact Zach Seeskin (z-seeskin@u.northwestern.edu)
- Streaming video: [click here] (link active about 5 minutes after start of seminar)