ArticleJournal of economic literature2020
How Well Do Automated Linking Methods Perform? Lessons from U.S. Historical Data.
Article in Journal of economic literature, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- What about immigration? The closed-population assumption in research on intergenerational income mobility.Frontiers in sociology · 2026Article
- Early-Life Lead Exposure and Male Longevity: Evidence from Historical Municipal Water Systems.Explorations in economic history · 2025Article
- Big cities fuel inequality within and across generations.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- The IPUMS Multigenerational Longitudinal Panel: Progress and Prospects.Historical methods · 2025Article
- The Longevity Benefits of Homeownership: Evidence From Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Male Birth Cohorts.Demography · 2024Article
- The Lifetime Impacts of the New Deal's Youth Employment Program.The quarterly journal of economics · 2024Article
- Public Pensions and Retirement: Evidence from the Railroad Retirement Act.Journal of public economics · 2024Article
- The Impact of Cash Transfers to Poor Mothers on Family Structure and Maternal Well-Being.American economic journal. Applied economics · 2024Article
- Novel linkage approach to join community-acquired and national data.BMC medical research methodology · 2024Article
- The Effects of the Great Depression on Children's Intergenerational Mobility.The Russell Sage Foundation journal of the social sciences : RSF · 2024Article
- CenSoc: Public Linked Administrative Mortality Records for Individual-level Research.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Children and Grandchildren of Union Army Veterans: New Data Collections to Study the Persistence of Longevity and Socioeconomic Status Across Generations.Historical methods · 2023Article
- The Creation of LIFE-M: The Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-Database Project.Historical methods · 2023Article
- A framework for a consistent and reproducible evaluation of manual review for patient matching algorithms.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2022Article
- The mortality risk of being overweight in the twentieth century: Evidence from two cohorts of New Zealand men.Explorations in economic history · 2022Article
- Reevaluating the Long-Term Impact of In Utero Exposure to the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.The journal of political economy · 2022Article
- (Almost) all of entity resolution.Science advances · 2022Review
- A New Strategy for Linking U.S. Historical Censuses: A Case Study for the IPUMS Multigenerational Longitudinal Panel.Historical methods · 2022Article
- Using administrative records to support the linkage of census data: protocol for building a longitudinal infrastructure of U.S. census records.International journal of population data science · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This paper reviews the literature in historical record linkage in the U.S. and examines the performance of widely-used record linking algorithms and common variations in their assumptions. We use two high-quality, hand-linked datasets and one synthetic ground truth to examine the direct effects of linking algorithms on data quality. We find that (1) no algorithm (including hand-linking) consistently produces representative samples; (2) 15 to 37 percent of links chosen by widely-used algorithms are classified as errors by trained human reviewers; and (3) false links are systematically related to baseline sample characteristics, showing that some algorithms may induce systematic measurement error into analyses. A case study shows that the combined effects of (1)-(3) attenuate estimates of the intergenerational income elasticity by up to 20 percent, and common variations in algorithm assumptions result in greater attenuation. As current practice moves to automate linking and increase link rates, these results highlight the important potential consequences of linking errors on inferences with linked data. We conclude with constructive suggestions for reducing linking errors and directions for future research.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.