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Bureau of Labor Statistics > Office of Survey Methods Research > Publications > Browse Research Papers

Assessing Nonresponse Bias in the U.S. Import and Export Price Indexes Survey

Helen M McCulley

Abstract

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has recently made great strides in mitigating survey nonresponse as a source of bias in the official U.S. Import and Export Price Indexes (MXPI) by calculating prices for homogeneous goods trade categories from administrative data reported by U.S. importers and exporters. These price estimates prior to 2025 were provided by participating sampled U.S. establishments in the international price survey. The increased use of administrative data comes at a crucial time as this voluntary survey experienced decreasing response rates before that date. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) mandates that any federal survey with response rates below established guidelines performs a nonresponse bias analysis. To address this OMB mandate and before the transition to the administrative data source, BLS analyzed the relationships of available variates to response, compared survey collected prices to preliminary administrative data price estimates, and completed a comprehensive comparative analysis of price index values calculated using publication production weights and nonresponse adjusted weights. Nonresponse bias was found to be minimal due in large part to the way in which low-level weighting and aggregate structures that are used to calculate the price indexes dampen extreme stochasticity by design.