• Last Updated: 09/29/2009

Data Services

Presentation for PA 5990

To the guest with whom I was just chatting: my apologies; I hit a wrong button and lost our chat. See http://factfinder.census.gov/jsp/saff/SAFFInfo.jsp?_submenuId=aboutdata_3&_pageId=geography for an explanation of what falls within counties. Most likely you'd want a file linking counties and county subdivisions. I don't recommend using zip codes as they don't directly relate to counties, as the graphic shows. Please do try to contact me again for more assistance (though I suppose email might be better this time) and I apologize for cutting off our conversation!

You found your study...you download your data...you run the setup file ICPSR provides...and the screen fills with errors. This webinar will address common problems in the setup files provided by ICPSR for data files.

ICPSR automates its data processing and the volume of data files is large and very heterogeneous in quality, size, and characteristics. As a result, the setup files and ready-to-go files do not always work perfectly. This webinar will help you to anticipate and fix many of these common problems.

Title: ICPSR Webinar: When Setup Files Go Bad...Debugging your SAS, SPSS, and STATA code so it works!
Date: Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/765557907

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

This webinar is open to the public - please share with any who might be interested!

The Internet Archive brings together the digitized government publications from lots of different projects so that you can search in one location for historical publications containing statistics. Of course, the search isn't exhaustive since not everything has been digitized, but the depth increases every day and there are materials from the Census back to at least the first decade of the 20th Century. Check it out at http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22United%20States.%20Bureau%20of%20the%20Census%22.

The Department of Treasury has released its report on its activities resulting from the Emegency Economic Stabilization Act (P.L. 110-343) and, indeed, they are reporting what they spent as cash rather than as the "net present value" reported by the Congressional Budget Office. See Tranche Report to Congress and Tranche Report Appendices.

To sum up:

Congressional Budget Office reports $17 billion actually spent.
Dept. of the Treasury reports $115 billion actually spent.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its October Monthly Budget Review. If one were to skim just the tables, one would get the impression that the TARP expenditures in October were $17 billion. In the paragraph below, however, the CBO notes that

"In CBO''s view, the stock investment and associated warrants should not be recorded on a cash basis but on a net present value basis, accounting for market risk, as specified in the Emergency Economic
Stabilization Act. CBO's preliminary estimate of $17 billion for the present value cost is included in its
estimate of $134 billion for the October deficit. However, CBO anticipates that the Treasury will report
the stock purchases on a cash basis. As a result, CBO estimates that the Treasury will report the October
deficit at $232 billion."

In short, we could see radically different claims of funds spent because of different methods of reporting the dollars committed. As always, you have to pay attention whenever someone starts quoting statistics...