Abstract

Governments perform national, labor-intensive censuses on a regular schedule. Censuses represent many of the largest peacetime expansions and contractions in federal hiring. The predetermined occurrence and scale of the census offers an economic experiment in the effects of temporary government hiring. This paper describes the construction of a data series on census hiring in the United States since 1950 and also collects available data on census employment in England and Wales, Canada, Korea, and Japan. Regressing total employment changes on census hiring yields coefficients extremely close to 1, indicating that there is no spillover from census hiring to the rest of the economy. Using census hiring and occurrence as instruments for government hiring in the US, Canada, and Korea, I estimate the effect of federal hiring on overall employment. Different samples yield varying jobs multipliers, with point estimates varying from -0.01 to 1.48. Including Korean and Canadian data yields lower multipliers, while including pre-1990 US data yields higher multipliers. In no specification can I reject the hypothesis that the job multiplier equals 1. In all specifications, standard errors are large enough that I can reject neither Keynesian nor crowd-out effects.

中文翻译：

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人口普查雇用会刺激工作增长吗？

摘要

政府定期进行全国性的劳动密集型普查。人口普查代表了和平时期联邦招聘中最大规模的扩张和收缩。人口普查的预定发生和规模为政府临时雇用的效果提供了经济实验。本文介绍了自1950年以来美国普查工作数据系列的构建，并收集了英格兰和威尔士，加拿大，韩国和日本的普查工作数据。将总就业变化与普查雇用率回归，得出的系数非常接近1，表明从普查雇用到经济的其他部分没有溢出。我使用人口普查招聘和发生情况作为美国，加拿大和韩国政府招聘的工具，我估算了联邦招聘对整体就业的影响。不同的样本会产生不同的工作乘数，点估计值的范围从-0.01到1.48。包括韩国和加拿大的数据，乘数较低，而包括1990年前的美国数据，乘数较高。在任何规范中，我都不能拒绝工作乘数等于1的假设。在所有规范中，标准误差都足够大，以至于我既不能拒绝凯恩斯主义也不能拒绝挤出效应。