Not necessarily presenting opinions of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation or any other institutional affiliation. 

Discussion: 

Academic-Statistical Agency Collaboratives 

to Create Data Infrastructure for Evidence-Building

FCSM Session K-4 November 4, 2021

Daniel L. Goroff
The Promise of Administrative Data

• Not originally collected for research or statistical purposes.

• E.g. transactions records of retailers, government agencies, social media, etc.

• Potentially more consistent, timely, and granular than surveys.

• Traditional surveys are getting harder to carry out in any case. 

• Neither individuals nor companies want to fill out surveys these days. 
The Perils of Administrative Data

• Not originally collected for research or statistical purposes!

• Little regard for permissions or other privacy protections, for metadata or 

other vital documentation, for consistency or validity checks, etc. 

• Negotiations concerning access terms can be long and frustrating. 

• What if sources front run? Manipulate? Change or stop their data flows?

• The data is almost never a representative or probability sample of any 

population of interest to the federal statistical system.
1. RESET 

• Re-engineer economic indictors like CPI for speed, consistency, granularity

• Use item-level transactions data that firms and aggregators already have

• Capture hedonic quality information and compare different indices

• Results are startling and suggest that federal statistics my systematically 

overestimate inflation by so much that macro textbooks need revising 
2. CJARS 

• Incomplete criminal justice data limits research questions, admits inconsistent 

definitions of concepts like recidivism, hinders search for effective policies

• CJARS collects, harmonizes, and links records to track individuals and cases 

across jurisdictions and over time: 2b records; 175m events; 36m individuals

• Limited economies of scale and limited sustainability based on private funders 

 

Roster File

U-M CJARS 

Secure Data 

Enclave 

Server

Local 

Agencies 

CJARS Database

CJARS statistical reports

External 

research 

request

Non-CJARS 

external 

publication

Physical Archive

State 

Agencies

Federal 

Agencies

Data Intake

Disclosure Review

Project Approval

Administrative Data

U-M CJARS Repository U.S. Census Bureau Data Providers External Researchers

Mueller-Smith (Univ. of Michigan) CJARS: A Collaborative Approach October 25, 2021 10 / 24
3. Decennial Linkages

• Mircodata files for 1960-1990 exist but do not include names

• Names were handwritten on census forms

• Census forms are stored on 250,000 microfilm reels

• Forms and data are highly restricted to protect respondent confidentiality 

• OCR gets 95% of ages but about 82% of last names
• FoodAPS is first comprehensive & national data on household food purchases

• 35 active researchers, 12 active institutions, 25 USDA grans, 22 papers

• Economic Research Service also studies food production industries

• Cooperative Businesses are particularly important but challenging to identify

9

Google Places API

Food Data Central 

Nutritionix

Nutrition API

IRI Perishables and 

Point-of-Sale

Food item 

descriptions

Name, address, 

and type of food 

places

Auto-complete 

for place names

Barcode scanning 

to get item details

Type-ahead for 

item description

4. Agricultural & Food Data
Some Sloan-Supported Data Projects
• Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation

• Sampling Frame Projects

4. Agricultural & Food Data Related 
3. Decennial Linkage Related 

• Bayesian Entity Resolution and Linking 

• Old Weather 
2. CJARS Related

• Evidence-Based Policymaking Act Implementation 

• Equitable Data Working Group 

MODERNIZING

U.S. DATA

INFRASTRUCTURE:

Design Considerations for

Implementing a National Secure 

Data Service to Improve Statistics 

and Evidence Building
1. RESET Related 

• Administrative Data Research Intermediaries 

(rather than negotiating one by one unsustainably) 

e.g. Institute for Research on Innovation and Science 

• Privacy-Protecting Research Protocols 

(since anonymization is not really possible) 

e.g. Differential Privacy and other methods