The Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Dynamics (QWI) and OnTheMap now provide detailed workforce statistics by employer age and size. These data allow a first look at the demographics of workers at small and young businesses as well as detailed analysis of how hiring, turnover, job creation/destruction vary throughout a firm's lifespan. Both the QWI and OnTheMap are tabulated from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) linked employer-employee data. Firm age and size information was added to the LEHD data through integration of Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) microdata into the LEHD jobs frame. This paper describes how these two new firm characteristics were added to the microdata and how they are tabulated in QWI and OnTheMap
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LEHD Snapshot Documentation, Release S2021_R2022Q4
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-51
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) data at the U.S. Census Bureau is a quarterly database of linked employer-employee data covering over 95% of employment in the United States. These data are used to produce a number of public-use tabulations and tools, including the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI), LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES), Job-to-Job Flows (J2J), and Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) data products. Researchers on approved projects may also access the underlying LEHD microdata directly, in the form of the LEHD Snapshot restricted-use data product. This document provides a detailed overview of the LEHD Snapshot as of release S2021_R2022Q4, including user guidance, variable codebooks, and an overview of the approvals needed to obtain access. Updates to the documentation for this and future snapshot releases will be made available in HTML format on the LEHD website.
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JOB-TO-JOB (J2J) Flows: New Labor Market Statistics From Linked Employer-Employee Data
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-34
Flows of workers across jobs are a principal mechanism by which labor markets allocate workers to optimize productivity. While these job flows are both large and economically important, they represent a significant gap in available economic statistics. A soon to be released data product from the U.S. Census Bureau will fill this gap. The Job-to-Job (J2J) flow statistics provide estimates of worker flows across jobs, across different geographic labor markets, by worker and firm characteristics, including direct job-to-job flows as well as job changes with intervening nonemployment. In this paper, we describe the creation of the public-use data product on job-to-job flows. The data underlying the statistics are the matched employer-employee data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program. We describe definitional issues and the identification strategy for tracing worker movements between employers in administrative data. We then compare our data with related series and discuss similarities and differences. Lastly, we describe disclosure avoidance techniques for the public use file, and our methodology for estimating national statistics when there is partially missing geography.
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LEHD Infrastructure S2014 files in the FSRDC
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-27R
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau, with the support of several national research agencies, maintains 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. This document describes the structure and content of the 2014 Snapshot of the LEHD Infrastructure files as they are made available in the Census Bureau's secure and restricted-access Research Data Center network. The document attempts to provide a comprehensive description of all researcher-accessible files, of their creation, and of any modifications made to the files to facilitate researcher access.
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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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The Recent Decline in Employment Dynamics
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-03
In recent years, the rate at which workers and businesses exchange jobs has declined in the United States. Between 1998 and 2010, rates of job creation, job destruction, hiring, and separation declined dramatically, and the rate of job-to-job flows fell by about half. Little is known about the nature and extent of these changes, and even less about their causes and implications. In this paper, we document and attempt to explain the recent decline in employment dynamics. Our empirical work relies on the four leading datasets of quarterly employment dynamics in the United States ' the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD), the Business Employment Dynamics (BED), the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), and the Current Population Survey (CPS). We find that changes in the composition of the labor force and of employers explain relatively little of the decline. Exploiting some identities that relate the different measures to each other, we find that job creation and destruction could explain as much of a third of the decline in hires and separations, while job-to-job flows may explain more of the decline. We end our paper with a discussion of different possible explanations and their relative merits.
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The Creation of the Employment Dynamics Estimates
July 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-13
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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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Business Dynamics of Innovating Firms: Linking U.S. Patents with Administrative Data on Workers and Firms
July 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-19
This paper discusses the construction of a new longitudinal database tracking inventors and patent-owning firms over time. We match granted patents between 2000 and 2011 to administrative databases of firms and workers housed at the U.S. Census Bureau. We use inventor information in addition to the patent assignee firm name to and improve on previous efforts linking patents to firms. The triangulated database allows us to maximize match rates and provide validation for a large fraction of matches. In this paper, we describe the construction of the database and explore basic features of the data. We find patenting firms, particularly young patenting firms, disproportionally contribute jobs to the U.S. economy. We find patenting is a relatively rare event among small firms but that most patenting firms are nevertheless small, and that patenting is not as rare an event for the youngest firms compared to the oldest firms. While manufacturing firms are more likely to patent than firms in other sectors, we find most patenting firms are in the services and wholesale sectors. These new data are a product of collaboration within the U.S. Department of Commerce, between the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
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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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