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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Long Term Effects of Military Service on the Distribution of Earnings
August 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-17
I estimate the long term effect of military service on quantiles of earnings and education using the Vietnam draft lottery eligibility status as an instrument. I compare the local quantile treatment effect estimator studied by Abadie, Angrist, and Imbens (2002) to the instrumental variables quantile regression technique developed by Chernozhukov and Hansen (2008). Ordinary quantile regression shows a large negative association between service in Vietnam and earnings of white men, with the effect increasing in magnitude for the upper quantiles. Quantile treatment effects estimates show the opposite pattern, although much smaller in magnitude, with a small negative effect at the lower end of the distribution, and a small positive effect at the upper end. This suggests the ordinary quantile result is due to heterogeneous selection effects. The two methods of quantile treatment effects estimation give similar results.
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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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Why Some Firms Export
June 2001
Working Paper Number:
CES-01-05
This paper presents a dynamic model of the export decision by a profit-maximizing firm. Using a panelofU.S.manufacturing plants, we test for the role of plant characteristics, spillovers from neighboring exporters, entry costs and government export promotion expenditures. Entry and exit in the export market by U.S. plants is substantial, past exporters are apt to reenter, and plants are likely to export in consecutive years. However, we find that entry costs are significant and spillovers from the export activity of other plants negligible. State export promotion expenditures have no significant effect on the probability of exporting. Plant characteristics, especially those indicative of past success, strongly increase the probability of exporting as do favorable exchange rate shocks.
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Small Business Growth and Failure during the Great Recession: The Role of House Prices, Race & Gender
November 2016
Working Paper Number:
carra-2016-08
Using 2002-2011 data from the Longitudinal Business Database linked to the 2002 and 2007 Survey of Business Owners, this paper explores whether (through a collateral channel) the rise in home prices over the early 2000's and their subsequent fall associated with the Great Recession had differential impacts on business performance across owner race, ethnicity and gender. We find that the employment growth rate of minority-owned firms, particularly black and Hispanic-owned firms, is more sensitive to changes in house prices than is that of their nonminority-owned counterparts.
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The Role of Start-Ups in StructuralTransformation
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-38
The U.S. economy has been going through a striking structural transformation'the secular reallocation of employment across sectors'over the past several decades. We propose a decomposition framework to assess the contributions of various margins of firm dynamics to this shift. Using firm-level data, we find that at least 50 percent of the adjustment has been taking place along the entry margin, owing to sectors receiving shares of start-up employment that differ from their overall employment shares. The rest is mostly the result of life cycle differences across sectors. Declining overall entry has a small but growing effect of dampening structural transformation.
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Measuring the Impact of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership
September 1996
Working Paper Number:
CES-96-08
In this paper, I measure the impact of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) on productivity and sales growth at manufacturing plants. To do this, I match MEP client data to the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database (LRD). The LRD contains data for all manufacturing establishments in the U.S. and provides a number of measures of plant performance and characteristics that are measured consistently across plants and time. This facilitates valid comparisons between both client and non-client plants and among clients served by different MEP centers. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) administers the MEP as part of their effort to improve the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing. The program provides business and technical assistance to small and medium sized manufacturers much as agricultural extension does for farmers. The goal of the paper is to see if measures of plant performance (e.g., productivity and sales growth) are systematically related to participation in the MEP, while controlling for other factors that are known or thought to influence performance. Selection bias is often a problem in evaluation studies so I specify an econometric model that controls for selection. I estimate the model with data from 8 manufacturing extension centers in 2 states. The control group includes all plants from each state in the LRD. Preliminary results indicate that MEP participation is systematically related to productivity growth but not to sales growth.
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Industrial Concentration of Ethnic Minority- and Women-Owned Businesses in the United States
June 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-34
The number of ethnic minority and women-owned businesses has increased rapidly during the past few decades. However, the characteristics of these businesses and their owners differ by race, ethnicity, and gender. Using a confidential national survey of ethnic minority and women-owned businesses in the United States, this study examines ethnic minority- and women-owned businesses segmented by industrial sectors. Consistent with gender occupational segregation, male- and female- owned businesses have distinctive sectoral concentration patterns, with ethnic minority women- owned businesses highly concentrated in a limited number of industrial sectors. However, the relationship between business sectoral concentration and business performance is not uniform across ethnic and gender groups. Concentration in specific industrial sectors does not necessarily mean poor performance when measured by sales, size of employment or payrolls. However, for women-owned businesses, those sectors obviously pay less and have marginal profits, especially if considering the size of the firms.
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Using Matched Client And Census Data To Evaluate The Performance Of The Manufacturing Extension Partnership
April 1995
Working Paper Number:
CES-95-07
This paper proposes a framework for evaluating the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP). The MEP is administered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as part of its effort to improve the global competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing industries. As the name implies, the MEP is modelled after agricultural extension. Rather than farmers the MEP's target population is small and medium sized manufacturers, generally those with less than 500 employees. The MEP currently supports 44 manufacturing extension centers around the country. These centers provide technical and business assistance for manufacturers much as county extension agents do for farmers. The goal of evaluation is to see if MEP engagements lead to positive outcomes from the view of important MEP stakeholders (e.g., MEP clients, MEP centers, NIST, state and local governments and Congress). These outcomes are discussed in McGuckin and Redman (1995) and include: Process Outcomes (e.g., adoption of a new technology by a client); Intermediate Outcomes (e.g., reduction in the clients defect rate); Business Outcomes (e.g., survival and profits) and Policy Outcomes (increases in employment,wages and/or exports). The evaluation framework described in this paper has two components. The first component is an evaluation dataset which contains measures of many of the program outcomes listed above for both MEP clients and a representative control group of non- clients. This dataset will be constructed by linking MEP client records with plant level Census data housed at the Center for Economic Studies of the Census Bureau. The Census data provides measures of several outcome and control variables which are comparable across both plants and time. The Census data include observations for all manufacturing plants in the U.S. from which representative control groups can be constructed. The MEP client records provide data on the type and intensity of extension engagements. Linking these rich sources of information yields a comprehensive and powerful dataset for MEP evaluation. The second component is an evaluation methodology which exploits this rich dataset to make statistical inferences about the impact of MEP services, while carefully controlling for other influences. By using this methodology, we can address many of the shortcomings which plagued previous attempts to evaluate extension services. In addition to evaluation, the dataset described in this paper may be used to profile the characteristics of MEP clients and compare them to non-clients. The Census data contain the complete universe of manufacturing establishments in the U.S.
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Foreign vs. U.S. Graduate Degrees: The Impact on Earnings Assimilation and Return Migration for the Foreign Born
June 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-17
Using a novel panel data set of recent immigrants to the U.S., we identify return migration rates and earnings trajectories of two immigrant groups: those with foreign graduate degrees and those with a U.S. graduate degree. We focus on immigrants (of both genders) to the U.S. who arrive in the same entry cohort and from the same country of birth over the period 2005-2015. In Census-IRS administrative data, we find that downward earnings trajectories are predictive of return migration for immigrants with degrees acquired abroad. Meanwhile, immigrants with U.S.-acquired graduate degrees experience mainly upward earnings mobility.
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Taking the Leap: The Determinants of Entrepreneurs Hiring their First Employee
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-48
Job creation is one of the most important aspects of entrepreneurship, but we know relatively little about the hiring patterns and decisions of startups. Longitudinal data from the Integrated Longitudinal Business Database (iLBD), Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS), and the Growing America through Entrepreneurship (GATE) experiment are used to provide some of the first evidence in the literature on the determinants of taking the leap from a non-employer to employer firm among startups. Several interesting patterns emerge regarding the dynamics of non-employer startups hiring their first employee. Hiring rates among the universe of non-employer startups are very low, but increase when the population of non-employers is focused on more growth-oriented businesses such as incorporated and EIN businesses. If non-employer startups hire, the bulk of hiring occurs in the first few years of existence. After this point in time relatively few non-employer startups hire an employee. Focusing on more growth- and employment-oriented startups in the KFS, we find that Asian-owned and Hispanic-owned startups have higher rates of hiring their first employee than white-owned startups. Female-owned startups are roughly 10 percentage points less likely to hire their first employee by the first, second and seventh years after startup. The education level of the owner, however, is not found to be associated with the probability of hiring an employee. Among business characteristics, we find evidence that business assets and intellectual property are associated with hiring the first employee. Using data from the largest random experiment providing entrepreneurship training in the United States ever conducted, we do not find evidence that entrepreneurship training increases the likelihood that non-employers hire their first employee.
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