This paper reports an investigation of the validity and reliability of a set of predictors of the survival of small, start-up companies. Having a bank loan was a significant positive predictor of survival . The use of the model as a predictor of survival was investigated on an hold-out sample. One group of companies in the hold-out sample had high predicted probabilities of survival, in spite of note having bank loans. This group had a survival rate that was slightly better than that of companies in the hold-out sample that had obtained bank loans. The group with high survival rate, but without bank loans, made greater use of other forms of loans. The group of companies with a high survival rate, but without bank loans, accounted for 22% of the hold-out.
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The Survival of Industrial Plants
October 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-25
The study seeks to explain the attrition rate of new manufacturing plants in the United States in terms of three vectors of variables. The first explains how survival of the fittest proceeds through learning by firms (plants) about their own relative efficiency. The second explains how efficiency systematically changes over time and what augments or diminishes it. The third captures the opportunity cost of resources employed in a plant. The model is tested using maximum-likelihood probit analysis with very large samples for successive census years in the 1967-97 period. One sample consists of an unbalanced panel of about three-fourths of a million plants of single and multi-unit firms, or alternatively of about 300,000 plants if only the most reliable data are considered. The second is restricted to the plants of multi-unit firms in the same time span and consists of an unbalanced panel of more than 100,000 plants. The empirical analysis strongly confirms the predictions of the model.
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Multinationals Offshoring, and the Decline of U.S. Manufacturing
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-22
We provide three new stylized facts that characterize the role of multinationals in the U.S. manufacturing employment decline, using a novel microdata panel from 1993-2011 that augments U.S. Census data with firm ownership information and transaction-level trade. First, over this period, U.S. multinationals accounted for 41% of the aggregate manufacturing decline, disproportionate to their employment share in the sector. Second, U.S. multinational-owned establishments had lower employment growth rates than a narrowly-defined control group. Third, establishments that became part of a multinational experienced job losses, accompanied by increased foreign sourcing of intermediates by the parent firm. To establish whether imported intermediates are substitutes or complements for U.S. employment, we develop a model of input sourcing and show that the employment impact of foreign sourcing depends on a key elasticity of firm size to production efficiency. Structural estimation of this elasticity finds that imported intermediates substitute for U.S. employment. In general equilibrium, our estimates imply a sizable manufacturing employment decline of 13%.
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Multi-Product Firms and Trade Liberalization
August 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-21
This paper develops a general equilibrium model of international trade that features selection across firms, products and countries. Firms' export decisions depend on a combination of firm 'productivity' and firm-product-country 'consumer tastes', both of which are stochastic and unknown prior to the payment of a sunk cost of entry. Higher-productivity firms export a wider range of products to a larger set of countries than lower-productivity firms. Trade liberalization induces endogenous reallocations of resources that foster productivity growth both within and across firms. Empirically, we find key implications of the model to be consistent with U.S. trade data.
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Who Dies? International Trade, Market Structure, and Industrial Restructuring
June 2001
Working Paper Number:
CES-01-04
This paper examines the role of changing factor endowments in the growth and decline of industries and regions. The implications of an endowment-based Heckscher-Ohlin trade model for plant entry and exit are tested on 20 years of data for the entire US manufacturing sector. The trade model provides predictions for which industries will see growth through the positive net entry of plants. A multi-region version of the same model has predictions for which regions will see high turnover and net entry of plants. In a country such as the U.S. that is augmenting both its physical and human capital, the least capital-intensive, least skill-intensive industries are correctly predicted to have the lowest rate of net entry. In addition, increases in regional capital and skill intensity are associated with higher probabilities of shutdown, especially for plants in industries with low initial capital and skill intensities.
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Human Capital Spillovers in Manufacturing: Evidence from Plant-Level Production Functions
November 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-27
I assess the magnitude of human capital spillovers in US cities by estimating plant level production functions. I use a unique firm-worker matched dataset, obtained by combining the Census of Manufacturers with the Census of Population. After controlling for a plant's own human capital, plant fixed effects, industry-specific and state-specific transitory shocks, I find that the output of plants located in cities that experience large increases in the share of college graduates rises more than the output of similar plants located in cities that experience small increases in the share of college graduates. Several specification tests indicate that the estimated effect is not completely spurious. First, within a city, the spillover between plants that are geographically and economically close is positive, while spillovers between plants that are geographically close but economically distant is zero. Second, most of the estimated spillover comes from hi-tech plants. For non hi-tech productions, the spillover is virtually zero. When I stratify the sample by the percentage of employees who are college educated, I find that the spillover is larger the larger the percentage of college educated workers in the plant. Third, density of physical capital in a city outside a plant has no effect on a plant's productivity. Consistent with a model that includes both standard and general equilibrium forces and spillovers, the estimated productivity differences between cities with high and low levels of human capital match remarkably well differences in labor costs that are typically observed between cities with high and low levels of human capital. This is important because, in equilibrium, any productivity gain generated by human capital spillover should be offset by increased costs.
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Firms in International Trade
April 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-14
Standard models of international trade devote little attention to firms. Yet of the 5.5 million firms operating in the United States in 2000, just 4 percent engaged in exporting, and the top 10 percent of these exporting firms accounted for 96 percent of U.S. exports. Since the mid 1990s, a large number of empirical studies have provided a wealth of information about the important role that firms play in mediating countries' imports and exports. This research, based on micro datasets that track countries' production and trade at the firm level, demonstrates that trading firms differ substantially from firms that solely serve the domestic market. Across a wide range of countries and industries, exporters have been shown to be larger, more productive, more skill- and capital-intensive, and to pay higher wages than non-trading firms.2 Furthermore, these differences exist even before exporting begins. The ex ante 'superiority' of exporters suggests self-selection: exporters are more productive, not as a result of exporting, but because only the most productive firms are able to overcome the costs of entering export markets. It is precisely this sort of microeconomic heterogeneity that grants firms the ability to influence macroeconomic outcomes. When trade policy barriers fall or transportation costs decline, high-productivity exporting firms survive and grow while lower-productivity non-exporting firms are more likely to fail. This reallocation of economic activity across firms raises aggregate productivity and provides a new source of welfare gains from trade. Confronting the challenges posed by the analysis of micro data has shifted the focus of the international trade field from countries and industries towards firms and products. We highlight these challenges with a detailed analysis of how trading firms differ from non-trading firms in the United States. We show how these differences serve as the foundation of a series of recent heterogeneous-firm models that offer new insights into the causes and consequences of international trade. We then introduce a new set of stylized facts that emerge from analysis of recently available U.S. customs data. These transaction-level trade data track all of the products imported and exported by the U.S. firms to all of its trading partners from 1992 to 2000. They show that the extensive margins of trade ' that is, the number of products firms trade as well as the number of countries they trade with ' are central to understanding the well-known role of distance in dampening aggregate trade flows. We conclude with suggestions for further theoretical and empirical research.
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The Life Cycles of Industrial Plants
October 2001
Working Paper Number:
CES-01-10
The paper presents a dynamic programming model with multiple classes of capital goods to explain capital expenditures on existing plants over their lives. The empirical specification shows that the path of capital expenditures is explained by (a) complementarities between old and new capital goods, (b) the age of plants, (c) an index that captures the rate of technical change and (d) the labor intensiveness of a plant when it is newly born. The model is tested with Census data for roughly 6,000 manufacturing plants that were born after 1972.
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The Nature of Firm Growth
June 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-30
Only half of all startups survive past the age of five and surviving businesses grow at vastly different speeds. Using micro data on employment in the population of U.S. Businesses, we estimate that the lion's share of these differences is driven by ex-ante heterogeneity across firms, rather than by ex-post shocks. We embed such heterogeneity in a firm dynamics model and study how ex-ante differences shape the distribution of firm size, "up-or-out" dynamics, and the associated gains in aggregate output. "Gazelles" - a small subset of startups with particularly high growth potential - emerge as key drivers of these outcomes. Analyzing changes in the distribution of ex-ante firm heterogeneity over time reveals that the birth rate and growth potential of gazelles has declined, creating substantial aggregate losses.
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THE IMPACT OF LATINO-OWNED BUSINESS ON LOCAL ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-34
This paper takes advantage of the Michigan Census Research Data Center to merge limited-access Census Bureau data with county level information to investigate the impact of Latino-owned business (LOB) employment share on local economic performance measures, namely per capita income, employment, poverty, and population growth. Beginning with OLS and then moving to the Spatial Durbin Model, this paper shows the impact of LOB overall employment share is insignificant. When decomposed into various industries, however, LOB employment share does have a significant impact on economic performance measures. Significance varies by industry, but the results support a divide in the impact of LOB employment share in low and high-barrier industries.
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