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Commissioner’s Corner
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Washington Statistical Society Recognizes Two BLS Employees
Monday, July 29, 2024
BLS was well-represented at the Washington Statistical Society (WSS) President’s Invited Talk and Award Ceremony held at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in late June. We were there to recognize and thank the current WSS President Dr. Jeffrey Gonzalez, as he completes his term. Jeff is the head of the BLS Mathematical Statistics Research Center. We were also there to acknowledge and celebrate the great work of two BLS employees who received prestigious awards from the WSS.
The Julius Shiskin Award is named for the former Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who earlier served as the Chief Statistician at the Office of Management and Budget and the Chief Economic Statistician and Assistant Director of the Census Bureau. The Award is designed to honor an unusually original and important contribution to aid in the management and interpretation of the economy or for exceptionally sound and innovative research in economic statistics.
Dr. Anne Polivka, Research Chief in the BLS Office of Employment and Unemployment Statistics, is the recipient of the 2024 Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics.
Dr. Anne Polivka
According to the citation:
Dr. Polivka is recognized for her leadership in developing the Contingent and Alternative Work Arrangements Supplement (CWS) to the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CWS is a crucial source of data on the growth of alternative work arrangements, including the relatively recent growth of platform-mediated work in the gig economy.
Dr. Polivka is also recognized for her leadership of the modernization of the CPS, which provided improved insight into work activity, hours of work, and earnings, and for her contributions to our understanding of the labor market impacts of Hurricane Katrina and Covid-19 and of the effects of manufacturers’ increased use of staffing agency employees on standard measures of manufacturing employment and productivity.
The Roger Herriot Award is named for the former Associate Commissioner of Statistical Standards and Methodology at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), who previously held several positions at the U.S. Census Bureau, including Chief of the Population Division. The award for Innovation in Federal Statistics is intended to recognize individuals or teams who, like Roger, develop unique and innovative approaches to the solution of statistical problems in federal data collection programs.
Dr. Susan Fleck, Assistant Commissioner for International Prices in the BLS Office of Prices and Living Conditions, is the recipient of the 2024 Roger Herriot Award for Innovation in Federal Statistics.
Dr. Susan Fleck
Dr. Fleck received the award for her pioneering research, novel statistical approaches, and groundbreaking solutions in modernizing federal price index programs. Dr. Fleck has been at the forefront of source data innovation. Her well-documented work has been instrumental in the production and improvement in quality and quantity of the monthly U.S. Import and Export Price Indexes (MXPIs) for measuring inflation, and she continues to collaborate with colleagues across the federal statistical programs to ensure that these MXPIs align with other agency-specific needs.
The award focuses on Dr. Fleck’s entrepreneurial effort to incorporate 10 million administrative trade records from the Census Bureau into the MXPI each month. This initiative represents one of the most dramatic innovations the MXPI has seen in its history. By devising a method to replace roughly 40 percent of its directly collected data with a reliable, cost-effective, high-quality administrative data set, Dr. Fleck found a solution to MXPI’s greatest challenge: falling survey response rates. Further, this not only results in a significant improvement in the quality and number of MXPIs published by BLS but has resulted in improved production processes, higher employee morale, and a framework to increase the use of alternative data in indexes in the future.