This series contains research reports, written by or in cooperation with staff members of the Statistical Research Division, whose content may be of interest to the general statistical research community. The views reflected in these reports are not necessarily those of the Census Bureau nor do they necessarily represent Census Bureau statistical policy or practice. Inquiries may be addressed t...

Compression and differencing techniques can greatly improve storage and transmission of files and file versions. Since files are often transported across machines with distinct architectures and performance characteristics, compressed data should be encoded in a form that is portable and efficient to decode. This paper describes the Vcdiff encoding format for differencing and compression data a...

An algorithm for synthesizing color textures from a small set of parameters is presented in this paper. The synthesis algorithm is based on the 2-D moving average model, and realistic textures resembling many real textures can be synthesized using this algorithm. A maximum likelihood estimation algorithm to estimate parameters from a sample texture is also presented. Using the estimated paramet...

This paper considers the conditional sum of squares estimator (CSSE) for the moderate deviation MA(1) process that has the parameter of the MA(1) with the distance between the parameter and unity being larger than O(T−1). We show that the asymptotic distribution of the CSSE is normal, even though the process belongs to the local-tounity class. The convergence rate continuously changes from an i...

Study deals with the land cover dynamics analysis using remote sensing data over urban, suburban area in northern Belarus (Polotsk and Novopolotsk cities and surroundings) over the period 1994 – 2002. SPOT 3 and 5 images are used for the study. Land cover change detection is conducted using image differencing and post-classification comparison methods. Several classification methods are tested ...

This article analyses the school performance of migrants dependent on peer groups in different international schooling environments. Using data from the international OECD PISA test, we consider social interaction within and between groups of natives and migrants. Results based on social multipliers (Glaeser et al. 2000, 2003) suggest that both native-tonative and migrant-to-migrant peer effect...

I develop a reform evaluation method for evaluating labor supply in nonlinear budget sets which is both structural and quasi-experimental. The model only requires preferences to be convex on the budget frontier and results in a simple three-dimensional labor supply function. The estimation exploits only the between-individual variation provided by tax reforms. I apply the method to evaluate ear...