Mark Roberts, former director of the Penn State’s Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC), and liberal arts professor of economics, retired at the end of December after 45 years at Penn State.
Roberts has led the FSRDC, part of the Social Science Institute, since its inception in 2014. Under his leadership, the research conducted at the center has become the most cited work in policy documents around the world, according to a policy and research database. Roberts’ research with the RDC has been cited in over 700 policy documents from 33 countries and has more than 21,000 Google citations.
The FSRDC at Penn State is one of 37 federal data centers around the country that are housed at R1 research universities or Federal Reserve Banks around the country. The data centers are a partnership between the Federal statistical system and research institutions and provide researchers with secure access to restricted economic, demographic, and health data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Center for Health Statistics, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis among other agencies.
FSRDC researchers hail from five Penn State colleges, including The College of the Liberal Arts, Health and Human Development, Earth and Mineral Sciences, Agricultural Sciences, and Smeal College of Business. There are currently 35 Penn State researchers with active projects in the center.
According to Roberts, “the FSRDC is also a valuable recruiting asset as many young economists, sociologists, demographers, and health researchers have begun projects in a FSRDC while in graduate school and seamlessly transfer their work to our center when they join Penn State.”
Roberts has been involved with economic data from the Census Bureau throughout his career. His collaboration with the Census predates the FSRDC network, when all research had to be done on sight at the Center for Economic Studies at the Census Bureau in Maryland.
“At the time, we were the first researchers to construct and use longitudinal firm-level data to measure patterns of firm entry, growth, and exit as well as patterns of job creation and destruction in U.S. manufacturing,” Roberts said. His focus on firm dynamics has led him to also study the decisions of firms to enter or exit export markets, to begin or expand R&D investment projects, and to branch out to other countries including Taiwan, Korea, Germany, Colombia, and Sweden.
Roberts’s work with the U.S. Census has also provided a source of training for his doctoral students. Two of his students have gone on to be research directors at the Center for Economic Studies and a third has been director of the FSRDC at Duke University.
“Throughout my career I have greatly enjoyed and benefitted from the interaction with the economists at the Census Bureau,” Roberts said. “They are very interested in working with academics to improve the measurement and interpretation of economic data. The FSRDC network provides opportunities for researchers to engage with staff at U.S. statistical agencies and to have an impact on the type of data collected and its use in policy analysis.”
Additionally, Ron Jarmin, Deputy Director of the U.S. Census Bureau, recently posted the blog “Revolutionizing Economic Measurement at the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies: Pioneering Research on Firm Dynamics, Employment Flows and Transformative Statistical Products” on the Census website discussing the history of the Center for Economic Studies and the development of census micro data to measure dynamics of the U.S. economy and citing Robert’s work.