The purpose of this paper is to examine how establishment births and deaths contribute to job creation, job destruction, and net employment growth at different frequencies of measurement. The longitudinal data are constructed from quarterly unemployment insurance microdata, and are essentially a census of establishments in all industries. Defining establishment births and deaths turns out to be an exercise in how to use cross-sectional administrative data for longitudinal research purposes. The analysis of job flows indicates that the frame is relatively small but certainly non-trivial, whereas births and deaths account for roughly half of all jobs created and destroyed on a triennial time frame. Net Employment Growth
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The Longitudinal Business Database
July 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-17
As the largest federal statistical agency and primary collector of data on businesses, households and individuals, the Census Bureau each year conducts numerous surveys intended to provide statistics on a wide range of topics about the population and economy of the United States. The Census Bureau's decennial population and quinquennial economic censuses are unique, providing information on all U.S. households and business establishments, respectively.
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Employment that is not covered by state unemployment
January 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-16
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MEASURES OF JOB FLOW DYNAMICS IN THE U.S.*
January 1999
Working Paper Number:
CES-99-01
This paper uses the new Longitudinal Establishment and Enterprise Microdata (LEEM) at CES to investigate gross and net job flows for the U. S. economy. Much of the previous work on U.S. job flows has been based on analysis of the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD), which is limited to establishments in the manufacturing sector. The LEEM is the first high-quality, nationwide, comprehensive database for both manufacturing and non-manufacturing that is suitable for measuring annual job flows. We utilize the LEEM data to measure recent gross and net job flows for the entire U. S. economy. We then examine the relationships between firm size, establishment size, and establishment age, and investigate differences resulting from use of two alternative methods for classification of job flows by size of firm and establishment. Cell-based regression analysis is used to help distinguish among the effects of age, firm size, and establishment size on gross and net job flows in existing establishments. We find that gross job flow rates decline with age, and with increasing establishment size when controlling for age differences, whether initial size or mean size classification is utilized. Firm size differences contribute little or nothing additional when establishment size and age are controlled for. However, the relationship of net job growth to business size is very sensitive to the size classification method, even when data and all other methodology are identical. When mean size classification is used, the coefficient on establishment size for net job growth is generally positive, but when initial size is used, this coefficient is negative. These results shed light on some of the apparently conflicting findings in the literature on the relationship between net growth and the size of businesses.
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The LEHD Infrastructure Files and the Creation of the Quarterly Workforce Indicators
January 2006
Working Paper Number:
tp-2006-01
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau,
with the support of several national research agencies, has built a set of infrastructure files
using administrative data provided by state agencies, enhanced with information from other administrative
data sources, demographic and economic (business) surveys and censuses. The LEHD
Infrastructure Files provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of workers, employers, and their
interaction in the U.S. economy. Beginning in 2003 and building on this infrastructure, the Census
Bureau has published the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI), a new collection of data series
that offers unprecedented detail on the local dynamics of labor markets. Despite the fine detail,
confidentiality is maintained due to the application of state-of-the-art confidentiality protection
methods. This article describes how the input files are compiled and combined to create the infrastructure
files. We describe the multiple imputation methods used to impute in missing data and
the statistical matching techniques used to combine and edit data when a direct identifier match
requires improvement. Both of these innovations are crucial to the success of the final product. Finally,
we pay special attention to the details of the confidentiality protection system used to protect
the identity and micro data values of the underlying entities used to form the published estimates.
We provide a brief description of public-use and restricted-access data files with pointers to further
documentation for researchers interested in using these data.
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Gross Job Flows for the U.S. Manufacturing Sector: Measurement from the Longitudinal Research Database
December 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-30
Measures of job creation and destruction are now produced regularly by the U.S. statistical agencies. The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases via the Business Employment Dynamics (BED) on a quarterly basis measures of job creation and destruction for the U.S. nonfarm business sector and related disaggregation by industrial sector and size class. The U.S. Census Bureau has developed the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) covering the nonfarm business sector that has been used to produce research analysis and special tabulations including tabulations of job creation and destruction. Both of these data programs build upon the measurement methods and data analysis of job creation and destruction measures from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) developed and published by Davis, Haltiwanger and Schuh (1996). In this paper, the LRD based estimates of job creation and destruction are updated and made available for consistent annual and quarterly series from 1972-1998. While the BED and LBD programs are more comprehensive in scope than the LRD, the extensive development of the LRD permits the construction of measures of job creation and destruction for a rich array of employer characteristics including industry, size, business age, ownership structure, location and wage structure. The updated series that are released with this working paper provide measures along each of these dimensions. The paper describes in detail the changes in the processing of the Annual Survey of Manufactures over the 1972-1998 period that are important to incorporate by users of the LRD at Census Research Data Centers as well as users of products from the LRD such as job creation and destruction.
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Multiple Classification Systems For Economic Data: Can A Thousand Flowers Bloom? And Should They?
December 1991
Working Paper Number:
CES-91-08
The principle that the statistical system should provide flexibility-- possibilities for generating multiple groupings of data to satisfy multiple objectives--if it is to satisfy users is universally accepted. Yet in practice, this goal has not been achieved. This paper discusses the feasibility of providing flexibility in the statistical system to accommodate multiple uses of the industrial data now primarily examined within the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system. In one sense, the question of feasibility is almost trivial. With today's computer technology, vast amounts of data can be manipulated and stored at very low cost. Reconfigurations of the basic data are very inexpensive compared to the cost of collecting the data. Flexibility in the statistical system implies more than the technical ability to regroup data. It requires that the basic data are sufficiently detailed to support user needs and are processed and maintained in a fashion that makes the use of a variety of aggregation rules possible. For this to happen, statistical agencies must recognize the need for high quality microdata and build this into their planning processes. Agencies need to view their missions from a multiple use perspective and move away from use of a primary reporting and collection vehicle. Although the categories used to report data must be flexible, practical considerations dictate that data collection proceed within a fixed classification system. It is simply too expensive for both respondents and statistical agencies to process survey responses in the absence of standardized forms, data entry programs, etc. I argue for a basic classification centered on commodities--products, services, raw materials and labor inputs--as the focus of data collection. The idea is to make the principle variables of interest--the commodities--the vehicle for the collection and processing of the data. For completeness, the basic classification should include labor usage through some form of occupational classification. In most economic surveys at the Census Bureau, the reporting unit and the classified unit have been the establishment. But there is no need for this to be so. The basic principle to be followed in data collection is that the data should be collected in the most efficient way--efficiency being defined jointly in terms of statistical agency collection costs and respondent burdens.
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Hires and Separations in Equilibrium
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-57
Hiring occurs primarily to fill vacant slots that occur when workers separate. Equivalently, separation occurs to move workers to better alternatives. A model of efficient separations yields several specific predictions. Labor market churn is most likely when mean wages are low and the variance in wages is high. Additionally, over the business cycle, churn decreases during recessions, with hires falling at the beginning of recessions and separations declining later to match hiring. Furthermore, the young disproportionately bear the brunt of employment declines. More generally, hires and separations are positively correlated over time as well as across industry and firm. These predictions are borne out in the LEHD microdata at the economy and firm level.
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An Analysis of Key Differences in Micro Data: Results from the Business List Comparison Project
September 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-28
The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census each maintain a business register, a universe of all U.S. business establishments and their characteristics, created from independent sources. Both registers serve critical functions such as supplying aggregate data inputs for certain national statistics generated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. This paper examines key micro-level differences across these two business registers.
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HIRES, SEPARATIONS, AND THE JOB TENURE DISTRIBUTION IN ADMINISTRATIVE EARNINGS RECORDS
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-29
Statistics on hires, separations, and job tenure have historically been tabulated from survey data. In recent years, these statistics are increasingly being produced from administrative records. In this paper, we discuss the calculation of hires, separations, and job tenure from quarterly administrative records, and we present these labor market statistics calculated from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program. We pay special attention to a phenomenon that survey data is ill-suited to analyze: single quarter jobs, which we define as jobs in which the hire and separation occur in the same quarter. We explore the trends of hires, separations, tenure, and single quarter jobs in the United States for the years 1998-2010. We discuss issues associated with creating these statistics from quarterly earnings records, and we identify the challenges that remain.
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Food and Agricultural Industries: Opportunities
for Improving Measurement and Reporting
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-58
We measure one component of off-farm food and agricultural industries using establishment
level microdata in the federal statistical system. We focus on services for crop production, and compare measures of firm and employment dynamics in this sector during the period 1992-2012 with county-level publicly available data for the same measures. Based on differences across data sources, we establish new facts regarding the evolution of food and agricultural industries, and demonstrate the value of working with confidential microdata. In addition to the data and results we present, we highlight possibilities for collaboration across universities and federal agencies to improve reporting in other segments of food and agricultural industries.
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