Business merger and acquisition activity has been brisk in the United States in the recent past. Yet very little information has been available to help researchers understand the effects of this activity on jobs, businesses, and the American economy. This paper takes a first look at examining merger and acquisition activity using the newly available Longitudinal Establishment and Enterprise Microdata (LEEM) file. The analysis focuses on industries, establishments, and employment by employment size of firm. A first-time comparison of establishments that were acquired and survived over the 1990-1994 period with those that survived but were not acquired finds that the acquired establishments experienced more job change and, in the end, more net job loss than the nonacquired establishments. Establishments in small firms that were acquired by new or large firms experienced especially rapid job growth; however; job losses in establishments acquired from large firms more than offset these job gains.
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NEW DATA FOR DYNAMIC ANALYSIS: THE LONGITUDINAL ESTABLISHMENT AND ENTERPRISE MICRODATA (LEEM) FILE
December 1999
Working Paper Number:
CES-99-18
Until now, research on U.S. business activities over time has been hindered by the lack of accurate and comprehensive longitudinal data. The new Longitudinal Establishment and Enterprise Microdata (LEEM) are tremendously rich data that open up numerous possibilities for dynamic analyses of businesses in the U.S. economy. It is the first nationwide high-quality longitudinal database that covers the majority of employer businesses from all sectors of the economy. Due to the confidential nature of these data, the file is located at the Center for Economic Studies in the U.S. Bureau of the Census. To access the data, researchers must submit an acceptable proposal to CES and become sworn Census researchers. This paper describes the LEEM file, the variables contained on the file, and current uses of the data.
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Longitudinal Establishment And Enterprise Microdata (LEEM) Documentation
May 1998
Working Paper Number:
CES-98-09
This paper introduces and documents the new Longitudinal Enterprise and Establishment Microdata (LEEM) database, which has been constructed by Census' Economic Planning and Coordination Division under contract to the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration. The LEEM links three years (1990, 1994, and 1995) of basic data for each private sector establishment with payroll in any of those years, along with data on the firm to which the establishment belongs each year. The LEEM data will facilitate both broader and more detailed analysis of patterns of job creation and destruction in the U.S., as well as research on the structure and dynamics of U.S. businesses. This paper provides documentation of the construction of LEEM data, summary data on most variables in the database, comparisons of the annual data with that of the nearly identical County Business Patterns, and distributions of establishments and their employment by the size of their firms. This is followed by a simple analysis of changes over time in the attributes of surviving establishments, and a brief discussion of turnover (business births and deaths) in the population and gross changes in employment associated with both establishment turnover and with surviving establishments. It concludes with a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the LEEM.
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Job Flow Dynamics in the Service Sector
November 1999
Working Paper Number:
CES-99-14
This paper uses the new comprehensive Longitudinal Establishment and Enterprise Microdata at CES to investigate gross and net job flows for 1990 to 1995 for all establishments in the service sector. After examining the recent shifts in the distribution of employment in non-financial services, from single unit firms to multi-unit firms, and from smaller firms to larger ones, we calculate five year gross and net job flow rates for these various types of establishments. This shows that the increasing share of service employment in large firms is not due to higher growth in larger firms. Seeking the dynamics behind the shift of employment to larger firms, we investigate how job flow rates are related to firm and establishment size, using alternative size classification methods. Gross job flow rates vary inversely with the age of establishments in services, as do net growth rates of surviving establishments, even after controlling for size. To help distinguish among the effects of age, firm size, and establishment size on gross and net job flows in services, multivariate regression analysis is used. We find that all gross job flow rates decline with increasing age of establishments when size and industry differences are controlled. Because the job destruction rate falls faster than the creation rate as age increases, net growth rates increase with age for services as a whole. Gross and net job creation also declines with increasing size of establishments, but destruction rates increase with size when controlling for age and industry differences. Firm size differences contribute little or nothing additional when we control for establishment size and age.
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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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Differences in Job Growth and Persistence in Services and Manufacturing
March 2000
Working Paper Number:
CES-00-04
Employment flows in services have greatly exceeded those in manufacturing over the recent decade. We examine these differences and their variation over establishment sizes and types. We test three hypotheses which have been offered to explain these differences: (1) that the difference in behavior of single and multi-unit establishments accounts for much of the difference in the net and gross growth rates of jobs in services and manufacturing; (2) that relative wage differences have a disparate effect on employment growth for services and manufacturing, and (3) that the rates of persistence (or retention) of new jobs are higher in multi-unit establishments than in single unit firms, and similar between the sectors after controlling for this. We find that it is primarily the underlying differences in establishment age and size distributions that account for the substantial differences in the average gross and net job flow rates of the two sectors, and that relative wage differences have a similar effect on employment growth in services and manufacturing.
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The Characteristics of Business Owners Database, 1992
May 1999
Working Paper Number:
CES-99-08
This report describes the Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO), 1992 microdata available to researchers at the Center for Economic Studies and the CBO survey. The Bureau of the Census has conducted the 1982, 1987, and 1992 CBOs for the U.S. Small Business Administration, the Minority Business Development Agency, and the general public. For the 1992 CBO, there were three surveys, a sole proprietor survey, an owner survey for each owner in partnerships and S corporations, and a firm survey for each partnership and S corporation. For database purposes, the owner questions on the sole proprietors survey and owner survey were merged, and the firm questions on the sole proprietors survey and firm survey were merged. The owner database has 116,589 records, and the firm survey has 78,147 records. The CBO reports on owners about their background such as owner type (race, and ethnicity), age, education, work experience, veteran status, etc. The CBO reports on firms (with and without employees) about their economic details such as industry, financing, home-based, exporting, franchising, profits, etc. In addition, the CBO was conducted in 1996 on firms in existence in 1992 allowing for some survivability analysis. The CBO over samples women and minority owners to allow researchers to more reliably study these owners. This survey is an extension of the Survey of Minority-Owned Business Enterprises (SMOBE) and Survey of Women-Owned Businesses (WOB) within the economic census. The CBO is available as a report, special tabulations, or microdata for approved researchers.
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Who Creates Jobs? Small vs. Large vs. Young
August 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-17
There's been a long, sometimes heated, debate on the role of firm size in employment growth. Despite skepticism in the academic community, the notion that growth is negatively related to firm size remains appealing to policymakers and small business advocates. The widespread and repeated claim from this community is that most new jobs are created by small businesses. Using data from the Census Bureau Business Dynamics Statistics and Longitudinal Business Database, we explore the many issues regarding the role of firm size and growth that have been at the core of this ongoing debate (such as the role of regression to the mean). We find that the relationship between firm size and employment growth is sensitive to these issues. However, our main finding is that once we control for firm age there is no systematic relationship between firm size and growth. Our findings highlight the important role of business startups and young businesses in U.S. job creation. Business startups contribute substantially to both gross and net job creation. In addition, we find an 'up or out' dynamic of young firms. These findings imply that it is critical to control for and understand the role of firm age in explaining U.S. job creation.
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The Business Dynamics Statistics: Describing the Evolution of the U.S. Economy from 1978-2019
October 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-33
The U.S. Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) provide annual measures of how many businesses begin, end, or continue their operations and the associated job creation and destruction. The BDS is a valuable resource for information on the U.S. economy because of its long time series (1978-2019), its complete coverage (all private sector, non-farm U.S. businesses), and its tabulations for both individual establishments and the firms that own and control them. In this paper, we use the publicly available BDS data to describe the dynamics of the economy over the past 40 years. We highlight the increasing concentration of employment at old and large firms and describe net job creation trends in the manufacturing, retail, information, food/accommodations, and healthcare industry sectors. We show how the spatial distribution of employment has changed, first moving away from the largest cities and then back again. Finally, we show long-run trends for a group of industries we classify as high-tech and explore how the share of employment at small and young firms has changed for this part of the economy.
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Private Equity and Employment
March 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-07R
Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses. To investigate this claim, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers U.S. private equity transactions from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments before and after acquisition, comparing outcomes to controls similar in terms of industry, size, age, and prior growth. Relative to controls, employment at target establishments declines 3 percent over two years post buyout and 6 percent over five years. The job losses are concentrated among public-to-private buyouts, and transactions involving firms in the service and retail sectors. But target firms also create more new jobs at new establishments, and they acquire and divest establishments more rapidly. When we consider these additional adjustment margins, net relative job losses at target firms are less than 1 percent of initial employment. In contrast, the sum of gross job creation and destruction at target firms exceeds that of controls by 13 percent of employment over two years. In short, private equity buyouts catalyze the creative destruction process in the labor market, with only a modest net impact on employment. The creative destruction response mainly involves a more rapid reallocation of jobs across establishments within target firms.
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THE MANUFACTURING PLANT OWNERSHIP CHANGE DATABASE: ITS CONSTRUCTION AND USEFULNESS
September 1998
Working Paper Number:
CES-98-16
The Center for Economic Studies, U. S. Bureau of the Census, has constructed the "Manufacturing Plant Ownership Change Database" (OCD)using plant-level data taken from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database (LRD). The OCD contains data on all manufacturing establishments that have experienced ownership change at least once during the period 1963-1992 . This is a unique data set which, together with the LRD, can be used to conduct a variety of economic studies that were not possible before. This paper describes how the OCD was constructed and discusses the usefulness of these data for economic research.
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