The trajectory of new business applications and transitions to employer businesses differ markedly during the Great Recession and COVID-19 Recession. Both applications and transitions to employer startups decreased slowly but persistently in the post-Lehman crisis period of the Great Recession. In contrast, during the COVID-19 Recession new applications initially declined but have since sharply rebounded, resulting in a surge in applications during 2020. Projected transitions to employer businesses also rise but this is dampened by a change in the composition of applications in 2020 towards applications that are more likely to be nonemployers.
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Early-Stage Business Formation: An Analysis of Applications for Employer Identification Numbers
December 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-52
This paper reports on the development and analysis of a newly constructed dataset on the early stages of business formation. The data are based on applications for Employer Identification Numbers (EINs) submitted in the United States, known as IRS Form SS-4 filings. The goal of the research is to develop high-frequency indicators of business formation at the national, state, and local levels. The analysis indicates that EIN applications provide forward-looking and very timely information on business formation. The signal of business formation provided by counts of applications is improved by using the characteristics of the applications to model the likelihood that applicants become employer businesses. The results also suggest that EIN applications are related to economic activity at the local level. For example, application activity is higher in counties that experienced higher employment growth since the end of the Great Recession, and application counts grew more rapidly in counties engaged in shale oil and gas extraction. Finally, the paper provides a description of new public-use dataset, the 'Business Formation Statistics (BFS),' that contains new data series on business applications and formation. The initial release of the BFS shows that the number of business applications in the 3rd quarter of 2017 that have relatively high likelihood of becoming job creators is still far below pre-Great Recession levels.
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Starting Up AI
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-09
Using comprehensive administrative data on business applications over the period 2004-2023, we study emerging business ideas for developing AI technologies or producing goods or services that use, integrate, or rely on AI. The annual number of new AI business applications is stable between 2004 and 2012 but begins to rise after 2012, and increases faster from 2016 onward into the pandemic, with a large, discrete jump in 2023. The distribution of AI business applications is highly uneven across states and sectors. AI business applications have a higher likelihood of becoming employer startups and higher expected initial employment compared to other business applications. Moreover, controlling for application characteristics, employer businesses originating from AI business applications exhibit higher employment, revenue, payroll, average pay per employee, and labor share, but have similar labor productivity and lower survival rate, compared to those originating from other business applications. While these early patterns may change as the diffusion of AI progresses, the rapid rise in AI business applications, combined with their generally higher rate of transition to employers and better performance in some post-transition outcomes, suggests a small but growing contribution from these applications to business dynamism.
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High Frequency Business Dynamics in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic
March 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-06
Existing small businesses experienced very sharp declines in activity, business sentiment, and expectations early in the pandemic. While there has been some recovery since the early days of the pandemic, small businesses continued to exhibit indicators of negative growth, business sentiment, and expectations through the first week of January 2021. These findings are from a unique high frequency, real time survey of small employer businesses, the Census Bureau's Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS). Findings from the SBPS show substantial variation across sectors in the outcomes for small businesses. Small businesses in Accommodation and Food Services have been hit especially hard relative to those Finance and Insurance. However, even in Finance and Insurance small businesses exhibit indicators of negative growth, business sentiment, and expectations for all weeks from late April 2020 through the first week of 2021. While existing small businesses have fared poorly, after an initial decline, there has been a surge in new business applications based on the high frequency, real time Business Formation Statistics (BFS). Most of these applications are for likely nonemployers that are out of scope for the SBPS. However, there has also been a surge in new applications for likely employers. The surge in applications has been especially apparent in Retail Trade (and especially Non-store Retailers). We compare and contrast the patterns from these two new high frequency data products that provide novel insights into the distinct patterns of dynamics for existing small businesses relative to new business formations.
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The Local Origins of Business Formation
July 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-34
What locations generate more business ideas, and where are ideas more likely to turn into businesses? Using comprehensive administrative data on business applications, we analyze the spatial disparity in the creation of business ideas and the formation of new employer startups from these ideas. Startups per capita exhibit enormous variation across granular units of geography. We decompose this variation into variation in ideas per capita and in their rate of transition to startups, and find that both components matter. Observable local demographic, economic, financial, and business conditions accounts for a significant fraction of the variation in startups per capita, and more so for the variation in ideas per capita than in transition rate. Income, education, age, and foreign-born share are generally strong positive correlates of both idea generation and transition. Overall, the relationship of local conditions with ideas differs from that with transition rate in magnitude, and sometimes, in sign: certain conditions (notably, the African-American share of the population) are positively associated with ideas, but negatively with transition rates. We also find a close correspondence between the actual rank of locations in terms of startups per capita and the predicted rank based only on observable local conditions ' a result useful for characterizing locations with high startup activity.
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Business Applications as Economic Indicators
May 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-09
How are applications to start new businesses related to aggregate economic activity? This paper explores the properties of three monthly business application series from the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics as economic indicators: all business applications, business applications that are relatively likely to turn into new employer businesses ('likely employers'), and the residual series -- business applications that have a relatively low rate of becoming employers ('likely non-employers'). The analysis indicates that growth in applications for likely employers significantly leads total nonfarm employment growth and has a positive correlation with it, whereas growth in all applications and applications for likely non-employers have weaker positive correlations and shorter leads. Furthermore, growth in applications for likely employers leads growth in nearly all of the monthly Principal Federal Economic Indicators (PFEI) included in this study. Impulse response functions from vector autoregression analysis indicate that growth of both total nonfarm employment and advance monthly sales in retail and food services have positive and long-lasting responses to innovations in growth of applications for likely employers. Overall, applications for likely employers appear to be a strong leading indicator of monthly PFEIs and aggregate economic activity, whereas applications for likely non-employers provide early information about changes in increasingly prevalent self-employment activity in the U.S. economy.
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Business Dynamics Statistics for Single-Unit Firms
December 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-57
The Business Dynamics Statistics of Single Unit Firms (BDS-SU) is an experimental data product that provides information on employment and payroll dynamics for each quarter of the year at businesses that operate in one physical location. This paper describes the creation of the data tables and the value they add to the existing Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) product. We then present some analysis of the published statistics to provide context for the numbers and demonstrate how they can be used to understand both national and local business conditions, with a particular focus on 2020 and the recession induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We next examine how firms fared in this recession compared to the Great Recession that began in the fourth quarter of 2007. We also consider the heterogenous impact of the pandemic on various industries and areas of the country, showing which types of businesses in which locations were particularly hard hit. We examine business exit rates in some detail and consider why different metro areas experienced the pandemic in different ways. We also consider entry rates and look for evidence of a surge in new businesses as seen in other data sources. We finish by providing a preview of on-going research to match the BDS to worker demographics and show statistics on the relationship between the characteristics of the firm's workers and outcomes such as firm exit and net job creation.
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Cyclical Reallocation of Workers Across Employers by Firm Size and Firm Wage
June 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-13
Do the job-to-job moves of workers contribute to the cyclicality of employment growth at different types of firms? In this paper, we use linked employer-employee data to provide direct evidence on the role of job-to-job flows in job reallocation in the U.S. economy. To guide our analysis, we look to the theoretical literature on on-the-job search, which predicts that job-to-job flows should reallocate workers from small to large firms. While this prediction is not supported by the data, we do find that job-to-job moves generally reallocate workers from lower paying to higher paying firms, and this reallocation of workers is highly procyclical. During the Great Recession, this firm wage job ladder collapsed, with net worker reallocation to higher wage firms falling to zero. We also find that differential responses of net hires from non-employment play an important role in the patterns of the cyclicality of employment dynamics across firms classified by size and wage. For example, we find that small and low wage firms experience greater reductions in net hires from non-employment during periods of economic contractions.
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Garage Entrepreneurs or just Self-Employed? An Investigation into Nonemployer Entrepreneurship
October 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-61
Nonemployers, businesses without employees, account for most businesses in the U.S. yet are poorly understood. We use restricted administrative and survey data to describe nonemployer dynamics, overall performance, and performance by demographic group. We find that eventual outcome ' migration to employer status, continuing as a nonemployer, or exit ' is closely related to receipt growth. We provide estimates of employment creation by firms that began as nonemployers and become employers (migrants), estimating that relative to all firms born in 1996, nonemployer migrants accounted for 3-17% of all net jobs in the seventh year after startup. Moreover, we find that migrants' employment creation declined by 54% for the cohorts born between 1996 to 2014. Our results are consistent with increased adjustment frictions in recent periods, and suggest accessibility to transformative entrepreneurship for everyday Americans has declined.
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Supply Chain Adjustments to Tariff Shocks: Evidence from Firm Trade Linkages in the 2018-2019 U.S. Trade War
August 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-43
We use the 2018-2019 U.S. trade war to examine how supply chains adjustments to a tariff cost shock affect imports and exports. Using confidential firm-trade linked data, we show that the decline in imports of tariffed goods was driven by discontinuations of U.S. buyer'foreign supplier relationships, reduced formation of new relationships, and exits by U.S. firms from import markets altogether. However, tariffed products where imports were concentrated in fewer suppliers had a smaller decline in import growth. We then construct measures of export exposure to import tariffs by linking tariffs paid by importing firms to their exported products. We find that the most exposed products had lower exports in 2018-2019, with most of the impact occurring in 2019.
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Don't Quit Your Day Job: Using Wage and Salary Earnings to Support a New Business
September 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-45
This paper makes use of a newly constructed Census Bureau dataset that follows the universe of sole proprietors, employers and non-employers, over 10 years and links their transitions to their activity as employees earning wage and salary income. By combining administrative data on sole proprietors and their businesses with quarterly administrative data on wage and salary jobs held by the same individuals both preceding and concurrent with business startup, we create the unique opportunity to quantify significant workforce dynamics that have up to now remained unobserved. The data allow us to take a first glimpse at these business owners as they initiate business ventures and make the transition from wage and salary work to business ownership and back. We find that the barrier between wage and salary work and self-employment is extremely fluid, with large flows occurring in both directions. We also observe that a large fraction of business owners takeon both roles simultaneously and find that this labor market diversification does have implications for the success of the businesses these owners create. The results for employer transitions to exit and non-employer suggest that there is a 'don't quit your day job' effect that is present for new businesses. Employers are more likely to stay employers if they have a wage and salary job in the year just prior to the transitions that we are tracking. It is especially important to have a stable wage and salary job but there is also evidence that higher earnings from the wage and salary job makes transition less likely. For nonemployers we find roughly similar patterns but there are some key differences. We find that having recent wage and salary income (and having higher earnings from such wage and salary activity) increases the likelihood of survival. Having recent stable wage and salary income decreases the likelihood of a complete exit but increases the likelihood of transiting to be an employer. Having recent wage and salary income in the same industry as the non-employer business has a large and positive impact on the likelihood of transiting to being a non-employer business.
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