Progress 02/01/15 to 01/31/20
Outputs
Target Audience:1. US Census Bureay 2. Tribal Leaders and Economic Development professionals 3. Researchers and Users of Census Data 4. Extension Professionals Changes/Problems:We were sucessful in improving the Census Microdata and generating reservation indicators for all US businesses the Bureau has data on and completed research that provides the first view of how reservation businesses differ from other nearby areas. Our efforts to disseminate research results and generate outreach matterial based on our own work were also sucessful. We were not able to generate publically available summary statistics that other practitioners can use readily due to how the disclosure process works within the Census Bureau. Work produced in FSRDCs can be released once certain criteria are satisfied, but this process cannot be used for releasing aggregate statistics at the community level. The Bureau would have to choose to produce a product intended for public use for wider use of the data this project enabled ot be achieved. However, this project greatly enhanced the technical capacity for the Census Bureau to do so if/when it finds it appropriate to do so. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Several of the project presentations were to government officials and fellow extension professionals. These were intended to introduce the augmented data from this project as a reasource. Examples include: TITLE: Measuring Economic Development in Indian Country EVENT: Department of the Interior webinar, September 12, 2016 TITLE: Establishment and Employment Density on American Indian Reservations, Compared to Nearby Counties EVENT: Federal Statistical Research Data Centers Research Conference, Texas A&M, September 15, 2016 TITLE: Indian Country Data Resources EVENT: University of Minnesota Extension Service Webinar, January 18, 2018 How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?In addition to book chapters and working papers we also published extensive suplements that publish summary data and methods to the extent possible. These are intended to provide a more in deapth look to potential users of the data. We also wrote a confidential technica paper detailing our methods and procedures and documentig the programs we used to geocode the census micro data, making it possible for other researhcers to use the augmented microdata inside the FSRDCs. Finally we held multiple presentations and trainings to government officials, tribal leaders, extension professionals and fellow researchers. A list of such is below: TITLE: Measuring Economic Development in Indian Country EVENT: Department of the Interior webinar, September 12, 2016 TITLE: Establishment and Employment Density on American Indian Reservations, Compared to Nearby Counties EVENT: Federal Statistical Research Data Centers Research Conference, Texas A&M, September 15, 2016 TITLE: Establishment and Employment Density on American Indian Reservations, Compared to Nearby Counties EVENT: Federal Reserve System's Community Development Research Symposium, Washington, D.C., March 22, 2017 Title: Business dynamics in Indian Reservations Event: Annual Conference of the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (FSRDC) UCLA, September 14th 2017 TITLE: Tribal-County Comparisons in Workforce Opportunity: Questions of Infrastructure and Social Capital EVENT: Tribal-Interior Budget Council, Twin Arrows Navajo Casino and Resort, AZ, July 24, 2017 TITLE: Reservation Establishments: Data from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Data and Integrated Longitudinal Business Data Sets EVENT: Annual Conference of The Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (FSRDC) UCLA, CA, September 14th 2017 TITLE: Indian Country Data Resources EVENT: University of Minnesota Extension Service Webinar, January 18, 2018 TITLE: Promoting Business Diversification as a Tribal Economic Development Strategy EVENT: Dept. of the Interior/Office of Indian Energy and Economic Development Staff Training, Shakopee, MN, February 27, 2018 TITLE: Promoting Business Diversification as a Tribal Economic Development Strategy EVENT: Reservation Economic Summit, Las Vegas, NV, March 7, 2018 TITLE: American Indian Business Dynamics Over the Great Recession? EVENT: Festschrift I, Honoring Stephen Cornell and Joseph Kalt, Harvard University, May 2, 2018 TITLE: Indigenous Peoples and Economics EVENT: National Economics Association Annual Conference, Salish Kootenai College, MT, June 14-16, 2018 TITLE: Reservations as Workplaces: Perspectives on Opportunities to Grow via Diversification EVENT: Festschrift II, Honoring Stephen Cornell and Joseph Kalt, University of Arizona,, November 2-3, 2018 TITLE: Panel Presentation on measuring economic activity in Indian Reservations EVENT: Brookings Symposium on the Future of American Indian Gaming, February 14, 2019 Title: The Economic Geography and Business Dynamics on Indian Reservations, Event: Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Brownbag Series, June, 27th 2018 What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
The first objective was fully acomplished. We worked within the Federal Statistical Research Data Center System (FSRDC) to produce geocodes for all emplyer businesses in the bureau's Business Register for years 2009-2012 as well as non-employers for year 2009. We then established if the location of each business was in a federally recognized Indian Reservation and created geographic indicators of such as well as geographic codes idenitfying the specific reservation. This work makes it possible for the first time to be able to use Census data to construct business statistics for Indian Reservations. Under the second and third objectives we compared reservation employment and economic patterns to nearby geographically similar non-reservation areas as well as business dynamics (business survival rates) over the same areas. We also examined predictors of such, including economic conditions as well as regulations related to gaming. Specifically, the project made progress in evaluating how the reservation business sector compares to the off-reservation business sector by focusing on a group of 277 federally recognized American Indian reservations in the contiguous 48 states for which Census demographic data were available to support analysis. This group of reservations was compared to a group of 514 counties that were spatially near at least one of the included reservations. These counties were further refined by the team's creation of "county complements," which are the portions of counties outside of federally recognized American Indian reservations. With this data, we found some important business sector differences between the reservation group and the county complement group. The team compared establishment and job counts from cross-sections of employers and non-employers across these two types of areas. Although the percentage of establishments in each of the 2-digit NAICS industries was similar for reservations and county complements, reservations had nearly a third fewer establishments per area resident on average. The extent of the reservation deficit varied by sector; regression analysis showed that deficits tended to be deeper for small (by population) reservations, which may have implications for Census survey methodologies. By contrast, reservations had about the same or slightly more employer-provided jobs per resident as the county complements, but this was due to very high job numbers in a few sectors, mainly Arts/Entertainment/Recreation, Accommodations and Lodging, and Public Administration. The team demonstrated that reservations' high jobs per resident in the Arts/Entertainment/Recreation sector was very heavily driven by jobs in the gaming industry (NAICS 7132). In many other sectors, reservations had job as well as establishment deficits, and in these sectors regression analysis also showed a tendency toward deeper deficits in low population reservations. Findings for the ILBD were broadly similar, except the revenue replaced jobs as a measure of establishment size and for that metric the disproportionately high sector on reservations was retail, not Arts/Entertainment/Recreation. However, when results for the LBD and ILBD were combined (using the simple assumption of one job per ILBD establishment), the overall results for establishment and job numbers were similar to those for the LBD. These findings may have implications for Census survey methodologies. They suggest that establishment counts are significantly lower (relative to area population) on reservations than in nearby county areas, that jobs on reservations are highly concentrated in a few industries, and that reservation establishment and (in some sectors) job deficits vary with population size. These spatial density results are summarized in two CES Discussion Papers (17-57 and 18-50) and two working papers for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis's Center for Indian Country Development (CICD). They are also the core of a chapter published in a Cambridge University Press book (proposed title Private Sector Economies for Native America: Entrepreneurship for the Seventh Generation) edited by Miriam Jorgensen, Robert Miller, and Daniel Stewart. The two CICD working papers were also each accompanied by a supplemental working paper listing detailed simulation results by sector and model. Dynamic analyses linked the geocoded businesses to the Bureaus Longitudinal Busines Database (LBD) for 2007-2012 and linked a geocoded version of the 2007 LBD to the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) and conducted work on employer dynamics differentials in reservations. We examined differences in business establishment survival patterns over time by virtue of their location on or off a reservation. We find that business establishments located on American Indian reservations have higher survival rates than establishments located in adjacent counties. These results are particularly strong for the education, arts and entertainment, wholesale and retail, and public administration industries. While we were not fully able to explain this result, it is consistent with the business establishments being positively selected with respect to their "fitness for survival" given the large obstacles necessary to start a business on a reservation in the first place. Alternatively, there may be certain safeguards in a reservation economy that protects business establishments from external economic shocks. Under objectives 4 and 5 we incorporated information on data availability and specific results from our research to a great number of presentations to Tribal Leaders, other government officials and fellow extension professionals. A full list of presentations is provided below under the dissemination section. While we consider the resulting programming that was feasible with the improved Census Data a success, some limitations on what was feasible did arise. Due to the Bureau's confidentiality rules and internal policies, the disclosure request process applicable to FSRDC projects does not allow for requesting summary statistics published for specific reservations by industry to create public data that is comparable to the data available for counties in publications like the County Business Patterns.
Publications
- Type:
Book Chapters
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2019
Citation:
Akee, Randall, Elton Mykerezi, and Richard M. Todd. Opportunities to Diversify: Reservation Workplaces and Job Numbers Compared to Nearby County Areas. In Jorgensen, Miriam, Robert Miller, and Daniel Stewart (eds.), Private Sector Economies for Native America: Entrepreneurship for the Seventh Generation. 2019, Cambridge University Press.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2018
Citation:
Akee, Randall, Elton Mykerezi, and Richard M. Todd. 2018. Reservation Nonemployer and Employer Establishments: Data from U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Databases. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Center for Indian Country Development Working Paper Number 2018-01 and U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Discussion Paper Number 18-50.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2018
Citation:
Akee, Randall, Elton Mykerezi, and Richard M. Todd. 2018. Supplement to Reservation Nonemployer and Employer Establishments. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Center for Indian Country Development Working Paper Number 2018-02.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2017
Citation:
Akee, Randall, Elton Mykerezi, and Richard M. Todd. 2017. Reservation Employer Establishments: Data from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Database. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Center for Indian Country Development Working Paper Number 2017-02 and U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Discussion Paper Number 17-57.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2017
Citation:
Akee, Randall, Elton Mykerezi, and Richard M. Todd. 2017. Supplement to Reservation Employer Establishments. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Center for Indian Country Development Working Paper Number 2017-03.
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