Andrew C. Forrester

Economist and Statistician in Washington, DC

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Welcome to my personal website. I serve as an economist and the lead demographer in the Division of Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. I am also an Adjunct Scholar in economics at the Cato Institute and a PhD student at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology and Data Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. My research focuses on economic statistics, labor economics, finance and banking, applied time series and seasonal adjustment, and formal demography.

My work has been cited in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, RealClearPolicy and other major publications. My peer‐reviewed work is published in The World Bank Economic Review, the Journal of Population Research, the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Kyklos, and the Quarterly Journal of Finance and Accounting among others. I have jointly contributed to book chapters published by Oxford University Press and World Scientific.

All views expressed here are my own and are not those of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Labor, or the United States.

Recent Posts

Intercensal Population Estimates

A common pitfall when using small area population data spanning decades is the potential series break around census enumeration years resulting from how the Census Bureau estimates population. The issue of structural breaks involves the switch by the Census Bureau from using the 2010 decennial census to a 2020 “blended base” as the population base for their estimates.

Last updated on Mar 24, 2023 12 min read

Seasonal Adjustment with R and X-13

This post is a work in progress to highlight the usage of X-13ARIMA-SEATS in R for seasonal adjust and forecasting via the seasonal package. I will provide some skeleton code to seasonally adjust a few series, highlight the most relevant diagnostics practitioners look at for seasonal adjustment and forecast quality control, and provide some simple functions to extract the data from seasonal package outputs and produce self-contained charts.

Last updated on Feb 7, 2023 5 min read

Projects

Aug 24, 2023

Data from the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA)

IRCA 1992 Legalization Summary Public Use Tape

Oct 9, 2021

Historical Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Data

Historical Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Data Files

Aug 13, 2021

Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Data

Data from the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).

Apr 27, 2021

FreedomData

FreedomData is a data package that contains measures of economic freedom for countries and the U.S. states.

Featured Publications

Estimating the Civilian Noninstitutional Population for Small Areas: A Modified Cohort Component Approach Using Public Use Data

I develop monthly estimates of counties' civilian noninstitutional population ages 16 plus (CNP16).

Andrew C. Forrester

Estimating the Civilian Noninstitutional Population for Small Areas: A Modified Cohort Component Approach Using Public Use Data

How Mass Immigration Affects Countries with Weak Economic Institutions: A Natural Experiment in Jordan

Using the Synthetic Control Method, this study estimates a significant and long-lasting positive effect on Jordanian economic institutions from the surge of refugees from the First Gulf War.

Alex Nowrasteh, Andrew C. Forrester, Cole Blondin

How Mass Immigration Affects Countries with Weak Economic Institutions: A Natural Experiment in Jordan

The Impact of the Community Reinvestment Act on Neighborhood Gentrification

We find that most CRA lending goes to non-LMI borrowers in LMI census tracts, consistent with the hypothesis that banks are “skimming off the top” - lending to less risky borrowers while fulfilling the letter (though not necessarily the spirit) of the CRA.

Diego Zuluaga, Andrew C. Forrester

The Impact of the Community Reinvestment Act on Neighborhood Gentrification

Publications

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Alex Nowrasteh, Michael Howard, Andrew C. Forrester (2023). Immigrants Do Not Negatively Affect the Economic Institutions of American States. Public Affairs Quarterly.

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Alex Nowrasteh, Andrew C. Forrester (2023). Immigrants Do Not Negatively Affect the Economic Institutions of American States. In Handbook on Global Migration.

Alex Nowrasteh, Vanessa Brown Calder, Andrew C. Forrester (2023). The Minimum Wage Undermined the Au Pair Program in Massachusetts. Cato Working Paper No. 73.

Andrew C. Forrester, Alex Nowrasteh (2023). Trust Doesn’t Explain Regional U.S. Economic Development and Five Other Theoretical and Empirical Problems with the Trust Literature. Kyklos.

Alex Nowrasteh, Andrew C. Forrester (2020). How U.S. Travel Restrictions on China Affected the Spread of COVID-19 in the United States. Cato Working Paper No. 58.

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