The Importance of a Household Living Budget in the Context of Measuring Economic Vulnerability: A Census Curated Data Enterprise Use Case Demonstration

The proposed Curated Data Enterprise (CDE) is a transformative approach for how the Census Bureau could accomplish its mission to develop and provide high-quality, timely, and geographically detailed statistical products by changing how it manages its data assets, incorporates information from external sources, and leverages them for the public good. The CDE explicitly focuses on curating not only the enterprise's data but also all of the processes associated with creating purpose-driven statistical products, including context, curation, and analyses, on platforms that permit public accessibility. The CDE would move the Census Bureau into a position to meet the challenges confronting statistical agencies in the 21st Century.

This report presents a Use Case on constructing geographic household living budgets (HLB) to identify capabilities for the CDE and to produce a statistical product that responds to the equity concerns of policymakers and researchers regarding social benefit thresholds. The concern is over the inequity of social benefit thresholds that over the decades have failed to account for cost differences among geographic areas. In a recent report from the Congressional Research Service (2022, p. 1), Weinstock stated,

“… policies that do not account for COL (cost of living) differences across places may inadvertently benefit some more than others. Additionally, policies that rely on data unadjusted for place in order to determine who qualifies for certain benefits, for example, may also inadvertently benefit some more than others.”

This Use Case is guided by principles and research steps in the CDE framework. It was selected because of the variety of publicly available data to construct the HLB and the need to construct it at a small geographic level. The lessons learned are twofold. HLBs can be constructed at the census tract level to incorporate geographic price differences that can lead to more equitable social benefit thresholds. The second is that it would be unrealistic to fill in data gaps by conducting new surveys at small geographic levels, rather it suggests that partnerships with for-profits and not-for-profits would need to be forged to resolve the data gaps highlighted in this Use Case.

Lancaster V, Montalvo C, Salvo J, Shipp S, The Importance of Household Living Budget in the Context of Measuring Economic Vulnerability: A Census Curated Data Enterprise Use Case Demonstration Proceedings of the Biocomplexity Institute, Technical Report. TR# BI-2023-258. University of Virginia; 2023 October. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18130/p43z-c742.

Funding: This research was sponsored by the U.S. Census Bureau Agreement No. 01-21-MOU-06 and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, Grant G-2022-19536.

Acknowledgments: We would like to thank our colleagues Deirdre Bishop, Michael Ratcliffe, and Lori Zehr, US Census Bureau’s Geography Division, Joseph V. Hotz, Duke University, Connie Citro, Committee on National Statistics, National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and Sallie Keller, US Census Bureau’s Chief Scientist and Associate Director for Research and Methodology. (The views expressed in the report are those of the authors and not the Census Bureau.)