DAVID JOHNSON, U.S. Census Bureau (practitioner)
I am honored to be nominated for the APPAM Policy Council, and to have the opportunity to participate in this important and influential organization. I have been participating in APPAM Fall Conferences for a number of years. As an economist in the Federal Government, my role in APPAM has focused on getting measurement right, and presented my first paper on poverty measurement ten years ago at the 1999 APPAM Fall Conference. During that time, I was also an adjunct faculty for the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. I am currently the Division Chief of the Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division at the U.S. Census Bureau. The division compiles and analyzes data on the socioeconomic characteristics of households, families and individuals, including the homeownership rates, income, poverty and health insurance statistics, and the current effort to reengineer the Survey of Income and Program Participation. Before joining the Census Bureau, I was the Assistant Commissioner for Consumer Prices and Price Indexes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and directed the production and evaluation of the CPI. I began my federal career at BLS in 1990 as a research economist in the Division of Price and Index Number Research, and eventually became Chief of that Division. I have written several journal articles on such topics as the measurement of consumption inequality and mobility, the effects of tax rebates, equivalence scale estimation, poverty measurement, specification testing, and the well-being of children. I have published articles in the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Review of Income and Wealth, and Monthly Labor Review. I received my Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota, and my B.S. in mathematics and economics from the University of Puget Sound. I hope to continue my involvement in APPAM, and with this nomination, hope to further the efforts of improving measurement of economic, social and housing statistics in order to inform policy decisions. I would welcome the opportunity to bring my experience and insight to the Policy Council, with the hope that I could further the interaction between the policy research community and the federal statistical system.