Cuts in U.S. Department of Defense budgets have led to changes in the personnel levels at military bases throughout the United States. Because these bases are often significant sources of civilian and military employment and also provide customers for local businesses, closing them distresses local citizens, business leaders and politicians. In, Defense Secretary William Cohen launched a new drive to close dozens more military bases. Given the timeliness and magnitude of these actions, and in light of the predictions of hardship surrounding them, it is important to realistically assess the impact of substantial personnel changes at military bases on employment at neighboring businesses. This study utilizes a new and uniquely well-suited confidential dataset to analyze this issue at the level closures' impact are thought to occur: individual establishments and their employees. Using an establishment-level panel dataset that covers all private establishments in California with positive employment from 1989 to 1996, I examine how the employment dynamics of establishments across the full spectrum of industries are affected by personnel changes at nearby military bases and find that despite establishments' growth rates declining, more establishments going out of business and fewer new ones starting, when bases close workers' employment prospects actually improve.
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Mom-and-Pop Meet Big-Box: Complements or Substitutes?
September 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-34
In part due to the popular perception that Big-Boxes displace smaller, often family owned (a.k.a. Mom-and-Pop) retail establishments, several empirical studies have examined the evidence on how Big-Boxes' impact local retail employment but no clear consensus has emerged. To help shed light on this debate, we exploit establishment-level data with detailed location information from a single metropolitan area to quantify the impact of Big-Box store entry and growth on nearby single unit and local chain stores. We incorporate a rich set of controls for local retail market conditions as well as whether or not the Big-Boxes are in the same sector as the smaller stores. We find a substantial negative impact of Big-Box entry and growth on the employment growth at both single unit and especially smaller chain stores ' but only when the Big-Box activity is both in the immediate area and in the same detailed industry.
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GOVERNMENT TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS* AND PLANT SURVIVAL: THE ROLE OF PLANT OWNERSHIP TYPE
February 1999
Working Paper Number:
CES-99-02
This paper compares the survival rates of plants participating in manufacturing extension programs to nonparticipating plants. Participating plants receive technical and business assistance from one of a nationwide network of extension centers intended to assist smaller manufacturers. Results suggest that plant survival is related to plant size, age, productivity, capital intensity and ownership type. Importantly, the impact of extension services differs across ownership types. Participating in extension increases the probability of survival for single unit plants, but not for multi units. This result is consistent with the notion that single unit plants have less access to information on new technologies and would, therefore, benefit more from technical assistance programs such as manufacturing extension.
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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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Agglomeration, Enterprise Size, and Productivity
August 2004
Working Paper Number:
CES-04-15
Much research on agglomeration economies, and particularly recent work that builds on Marshall's concept of the industrial district, postulates that benefits derived from proximity between businesses are strongest for small enterprises (Humphrey 1995, Sweeney and Feser 1998). With internal economies a function of the shape of the average cost curve and level of production, and external economies in shifts of that curve, a small firm enjoying external economies characteristic of industrial districts (or complexes or simply urbanized areas) may face the same average costs as the larger firm producing a higher volume of output (Oughton and Whittam 1997; Carlsson 1996; Humphrey 1995). Thus we observe the seeming paradox of large firms that enjoy internal economies of scale co-existing with smaller enterprises that should, by all accounts, be operating below minimum efficient scale. With the Birch-inspired debate on the relative job- and innovation-generating capacity of small and large firms abating (Ettlinger 1997), research on the small firm sector has shifted to an examination of the business strategies and sources of competitiveness of small enterprises (e.g., Pratten 1991, Nooteboom 1993). Technological external scale economies are a key feature of this research (Oughton and Whittam 1997).
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Do Walmart Supercenters Improve Food Security?
June 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-31
This paper examines the effect of Walmart Supercenters, which lower food prices and expand food availability, on household and child food insecurity. Our food insecurity-related outcomes come from the 2001-2012 waves of the December Current Population Study Food Security Supplement. Using narrow geographic identifiers available in the restricted version of these data, we compute the distance between each household's census tract of residence and the nearest Walmart Supercenter. We estimate instrumental variables models that leverage the predictable geographic expansion patterns of Walmart Supercenters outward from Walmart's corporate headquarters. Results suggest that closer proximity to a Walmart Supercenter improves the food security of households and children, as measured by number of affirmative responses to a food insecurity questionnaire and an indicator for food insecurity. The effects are largest among low-income households and children, but are also sizeable for middle-income children.
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Published Versus Sample Statistics From The ASM: Implications For The LRD
January 1991
Working Paper Number:
CES-91-01
In principle, the Longitudinal Research Database ( LRD ) which links the establishments in the Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) is ideal for examining the dynamics of firm and aggregate behavior. However, the published ASM aggregates are not simply the appropriately weighted sums of establishment data in the LRD . Instead, the published data equal the sum of LRD-based sample estimates and nonsample estimates. The latter reflect adjustments related to sampling error and the imputation of small-establishment data. Differences between the LRD and the ASM raise questions for users of both data sets. For ASM users, time-series variation in the difference indicates potential problems in consistently and reliably estimating the nonsample portion of the ASM. For LRD users, potential sample selection problems arise due to the systematic exclusion of data from small establishments. Microeconomic studies based on the LRD can yield misleading inferences to the extent that small establishments behave differently. Similarly, new economic aggregates constructed from the LRD can yield incorrect estimates of levels and growth rates. This paper documents cross-sectional and time-series differences between ASM and LRD estimates of levels and growth rates of total employment, and compares them with employment estimates provided by Bureau of Labor Statistics and County Business Patterns data. In addition, this paper explores potential adjustments to economic aggregates constructed from the LRD. In particular, the paper reports the results of adjusting LRD-based estimates of gross job creation and destruction to be consistent with net job changes implied by the published ASM figures.
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Tracing the Sources of Local External Economies
August 2004
Working Paper Number:
CES-04-13
In a cross-sectional establishment-level analysis using confidential secondary data, I evaluate the influence of commonly postulated sources of localized external economies'supplier access, labor pools, and knowledge spillovers'on the productivity of two U.S. manufacturing sectors (farm and garden machinery and measuring and controlling devices). Measures incorporating different distance decay specifications provide evidence of the spatial extent of the various externality sources. Chinitz's (1961) hypothesis of the link between local industrial organization and agglomeration economies is also investigated. The results show evidence of labor pooling economies and university-linked knowledge spillovers in the case of the higher technology measuring and controlling devices sector, while access to input supplies and location near centers of applied innovation positively influence efficiency in the farm and garden machinery industry. Both sectors benefit from proximity to producer services, though primarily at a regional rather than highly localized scale.
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Access to Workers or Employers? An Intra-Urban Analysis of Plant Location Decisions
September 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-21R
This analysis attributes economies of agglomeration to either labor market pooling or employer-based productivity spillovers by distinguishing the effect of access to workers, measured by place-of-residence, from the effect of access to employers. New establishment location choices serve as a measure of productivity advantages, while census tract level data on access to same-industry employment, other-industry employment, and specialized workers, as well as metropolitan area fixed effects, measure sources of agglomeration and other locational characteristics. The four industries included are selected so that each relies on a workforce with a specialized occupation that is identifiable by place-of-residence, and that productivity and cost advantages are the primary drivers of location choice. The results show that both access to specialized workers and access to same-industry employers contribute to economies of agglomeration at an intra-urban spatial scale, and that the magnitude of the worker effect is large relative to employer-based productivity spillovers.
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The Contribution Of Establishment Births And Deaths To Employment Growth
April 1998
Working Paper Number:
CES-98-05
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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Clusters of Entrepreneurship
October 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-36
Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry costs or raise entrepreneurial returns, thereby increasing net returns and attracting entrepreneurs. A second class of theories hypothesizes that some places are endowed with a greater supply of entrepreneurship. Evidence on sales per worker does not support the higher returns for entrepreneurship rationale. Our evidence suggests that entrepreneurship is higher when fixed costs are lower and when there are more entrepreneurial people.
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