A model-based approach to predict employee compensation components

Abstract

The demand for official statistics at fine levels is motivating researchers to explore estimation methods that extend beyond the traditional survey-based estimation. For this work, the challenge originated with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, who conducts the National Compensation Survey to collect compensation data from a nationwide sample of establishments. The objective is to obtain predictions of the wage and non-wage components of compensation for a large number of employment domains defined by detailed job characteristics. Survey estimates are only available for a small subset of these domains. To address the objective, we developed a bivariate hierarchical Bayes model that jointly predicts the wage and non-wage compensation components for a large number of employment domains defined by detailed job characteristics. We also discuss solutions to some practical challenges encountered in implementing small area estimation methods in large-scale settings, including methods for defining the prediction space, for constructing and selecting the information that serves as model input, and for obtaining stable survey variance and covariance estimates.