census.gov Notification
Due to the lapse of federal funding, portions of this website are not being updated. Any inquiries submitted via www.census.gov will not be answered until appropriations are enacted.

Releasing Earnings Distributions using Differential Privacy: Disclosure Avoidance System For Post Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO)

Written by:
Working Paper Number: CES-19-13

Abstract

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released data on earnings percentiles of graduates from post secondary institutions. This paper describes and evaluates the disclosure avoidance system developed for these statistics. We propose a differentially private algorithm for releasing these data based on standard differentially private building blocks, by constructing a histogram of earnings and the application of the Laplace mechanism to recover a differentially-private CDF of earnings. We demonstrate that our algorithm can release earnings distributions with low error, and our algorithm out-performs prior work based on the concept of smooth sensitivity from Nissim, Raskhodnikova and Smith (2007).

Page Last Revised - October 8, 2021