July 29 -- The Census Bureau invites public comment by September 27, 2021 on its draft proposal to conduct the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS) 2021.
The Census Bureau plans to conduct the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS) for survey year 2021; the survey was previously conducted for survey years 2010 and 2015. The survey will be conducted as a joint project by the Census Bureau, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
The MOPS will utilize the Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) mail-out sample and will collect information on management and organizational practices at the establishment level. The Census Bureau has conducted the ASM since 1949 to provide key measures of manufacturing activity during intercensal periods. In years that we conduct the Economic Census, years ending in “2” and “7”, we do not mail the ASM but collect the data as part of the Economic Census covering the Manufacturing Sector. The ASM is an integral part of the Federal Government's statistical program, furnishing up-to date estimates of employment and payroll, hours and wages of production workers, value added by manufacture, cost of materials, value of shipments, inventories, and expenditures for both plant and equipment and structures.
The data obtained from the MOPS will allow the Census Bureau to estimate a firm's stock of management and organizational assets, specifically the use of decentralized decision rights and establishment performance data such as production targets in decision-making. These data will provide information on investments in management and organizational practices, which will lead to a better understanding of the benefits from these investments when measured in terms of firm productivity or firm market value. This survey on management and organizational practices will provide information on the dimensions of organizational capital for this sector not currently available elsewhere.
This clearance request will be for the survey year 2021. The Census Bureau plans to make the following changes to the 2015 MOPS content for the 2021 survey:
Add a new purchased services module on the establishment's use of its own employees, contractors, temporary staff, or leased workers for select business expenses.
Update the data and decision-making module by removing five of the six questions, maintaining a question asking who decides what data to collect for continuity, and adding nine questions focused on the frontier uses of data to inform artificial intelligence.
Add three questions to the background characteristics module on the establishment's use of an external Certified Public Accountant.
Simplify questions on the location of decision-making in multi-location firms in the organization module by combining them into a single table and removing write-in responses.
Remove four forecasting questions in the uncertainty module.
Remove two questions related to the establishment's background characteristics.
Remove all questions about a five-year recall period.
The 2021 MOPS will be mailed separately from the 2021 ASM and will utilize an entirely electronic collection. Unlike the ASM that mails to the headquarters of companies with multiple locations, the MOPS will be mailed directly to the individual establishments. Initial contact with respondents will be a mailed letter directing them to report online. Respondents will report electronically through the Census Bureau's Centurion online reporting system. The sample for the 2021 MOPS will consist of the approximately 50,000 establishments in the 2021 ASM mail-out sample. The mail-out sample for the ASM is redesigned at 5-year intervals beginning the second survey year after the Economic Census. For the 2019 ASM, a new probability sample was selected from a frame of approximately 100,000 manufacturing establishments in the 2017 Economic Census that had paid employees, were located in the United States, and were associated with multi-location companies or were large single-establishment companies. On an annual basis, the mail-out sample is supplemented with large, newly active single-establishment companies identified from a list provided by the Internal Revenue Service and new manufacturing establishments of multi-location companies identified from the Census Bureau's Company Organization Survey.
MOPS website:
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/mops.html
Draft 2021 MOPS survey instrument:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ngrdmj40ufc0yn/2021%20MOPS%20draft%20survey.pdf?dl=0
FR notice inviting public comment:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/07/29/2021-16151/agency-information-collection-activities-submission-to-the-office-of-management-and-budget-omb-for
Point of contact: Marlo Thornton, Assistant Division Chief, Economy-Wide Statistics Division, Census Bureau marlo.n.thornton@census.gov 301-763-7170
