This paper examines how the state of the economy when businesses begin operations affects
their size and performance over the lifecycle. Using micro-level data that covers the entire universe of businesses operating in the U.S. since the late 1970s, I provide new evidence that businesses born in downturns start on a smaller scale and remain smaller over their entire lifecycle. In fact, I find no evidence that these differences attenuate even long after entry. Using new data on the productivity and composition of startup businesses, I show that this persistence is related to selection at entry and demand-side channels.
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Has toughness of local competition declined?
May 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-13
Recent evidence on rm-level markups and concentration raises a concern that market
competition has declined in the U.S. over the last few decades. Since measuring competition is difficult, methodologies used to arrive at these findings have merits but also raise technical concerns which question the validity of these results. Given the significance of documenting how competition has changed, I contribute to this literature by studying a different measure of competition. Specifically, I estimate the toughness of local competition over time. To derive this estimate, I use a generalized monopolistic competition model with variable markups. This model generates insights that allows me to measure competition as the sensitivity of weighted-average markup to changes in the number of competitors using directly observable variables. Compared to firm-level markups estimation, this method relaxes the need to estimate production functions. I then use confidential Census data to estimate toughness of local competition from 1997 to 2016, which shows that local competition has decreased in non-tradable industries on average in the U.S. during this time period.
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Older and Slower: The Startup Deficit's Lasting Effects on Aggregate Productivity Growth
June 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-29
We investigate the link between declining firm entry, aging incumbent firms and sluggish U.S. productivity growth. We provide a dynamic decomposition framework to characterize the contributions to industry productivity growth across the firm age distribution and apply this framework to the newly developed Revenue-enhanced Longitudinal Business Database (ReLBD). Overall, several key findings emerge: (i) the relationship between firm age and productivity growth is downward sloping and convex; (ii) the magnitudes are substantial and significant but fade quickly, with nearly 2/3 of the effect disappearing after five years and nearly the entire effect disappearing after ten; (iii) the higher productivity growth of young firms is driven nearly exclusively by the forces of selection and reallocation. Our results suggest a cumulative drag on aggregate productivity of 3.1% since 1980. Using an instrumental variables strategy we find a consistent pattern across states/MSAs in the U.S. The patterns are broadly consistent with a standard model of firm dynamics with monopolistic competition.
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How Collateral Affects Small Business Lending: The Role of Lender Specialization
August 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-22
I study the role of collateral on small business credit access in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. I construct a novel, loan-level dataset covering all collateralized small business lending in Texas from 2002-2016 and link it to the U.S. Census of Establishments. Using textual analysis, I show that post-2008, lenders reduced credit supply to borrowers outside of the lender's collateral specialization. This result holds when comparing lending to the same borrower from different lenders, and when comparing lending by the same lender to different borrowers. A one standard deviation higher specialization in collateral increases lending to the same firm by 3.7%. Abstracting from general equilibrium effects, if firms switched to lenders with the highest specialization in their collateral, aggregate lending would increase by 14.8%. Furthermore, firms borrowing from lenders with greater specialization in the borrower's collateral see a larger growth in employment after 2008. Finally, I show that firms with collateral more frequently accepted by lenders in the economy find it easier to switch lenders. In sum, my paper shows that borrowing from specialized lenders increases access to credit and employment during a financial crisis.
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Compositional Nature of Firm Growth and Aggregate Fluctuations
March 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-09
This paper studies firm dynamics over the business cycle. I present evidence from the United Kingdom that more rapidly growing firms are born in expansions than in recessions. Using administrative records from Census data, I find that this observation also holds for the last four recessions in the United States. I also present suggestive evidence that financial frictions play an important role in determining the types of firms that are born at different stages of the business cycle. I then develop a general equilibrium model in which firms choose their managers' span of control at birth. Firms that choose larger spans of control grow faster and eventually get to be larger, and in this sense have a larger target size. Financial frictions in the form of collateral constraints slow the rate at which firms reach their target size. It takes firms longer to get up to scale when collateral constraints tighten; therefore, businesses with the largest target size are affected disproportionately more. Thus, fewer entrepreneurs find it profitable to choose larger projects when financial conditions deteriorate. Using Bayesian methods, I estimate the model using micro and aggregate data from the United Kingdom. I find that financial shocks account for over 80% of fluctuations in the formation of businesses with a large target size, and TFP and labor wedge shocks account for the remaining 20%. An independently estimated version of the model with no choice over the span of control needs larger aggregate shocks in order to account for the same data series, suggesting that the intensive margin of business formation is important at business cycle frequencies. The model with the choice over the span of control generates an empirically relevant and non-targeted collapse in the right tail of the cumulative growth distribution among firms started in recessions, while the model without such a choice does not. The paper also discusses implications for micro-targeted government stimulus policies.
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Democratizing Entry: Banking Deregulations, Financing Constraints, and Entrepreneurship
December 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-33
We study how US branch-banking deregulations affected the entry and exit of firms in the non-financial sector using establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database. The comprehensive micro-data allow us to study how the entry rate, the distribution of entry sizes, and survival rates for firms responded to changes in banking competition. We also distinguish the relative effect of the policy reforms on the entry of startups versus facility expansions by existing firms. We find that the deregulations reduced financing constraints, particularly among small startups, and improved ex ante allocative efficiency across the entire firm-size distribution. However, the US deregulations also led to a dramatic increase in 'churning' at the lower end of the size distribution, where new startups fail within the first three years following entry. This churning emphasizes a new mechanism through which financial sector reforms impact product markets. It is not exclusively better ex ante allocation of capital to qualified projects that causes creative destruction; rather banking deregulations can also 'democratize' entry by allowing many more startups to be founded. The vast majority of these new entrants fail along the way, but a few survive ex post to displace incumbents.
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Destructive Creation at Work: How Financial Distress Spurs Entrepreneurship
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-19
Using US Census employer-employee matched data, I show that employer financial
distress accelerates the exit of employees to found start-ups. This effect is particularly evident when distressed firms are less able to enforce contracts restricting employee mobility into competing firms. Entrepreneurs exiting financially distressed employers earn higher wages prior to the exit and after founding start-ups, compared to entrepreneurs exiting non-distressed firms. Consistent with distressed firms losing higher-quality workers, their start-ups have higher average employment and payroll growth. The results suggest that the social costs of distress might be lower than the private costs to financially distressed firms.
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Soft Information and Investment: Evidence from Plant-Level Data
October 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-38R
A reduction in travel time between headquarters and plants makes it easier for headquarters to monitor plants and gather 'soft' information--i.e., information that cannot be transmitted through non-personal means. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, I find that the introduction of new airline routes that reduce the travel time between headquarters and plants leads to an increase in plant-level investment of 8% to 9% and an increase in plants' total factor productivity of 1.3% to 1.4%. Consistent with the notion that a reduction in travel time makes it easier for headquarters to monitor plants and gather soft information, I find that my results are stronger: i) for plants whose headquarters are more time constrained; ii) for plants operating in soft-information industries; iii) during the earlier years of my sample period, when alternative, non-personal, means of monitoring and transmitting information were less developed; iv) for plants where information uncertainty is likely to be greater and soft information is likely to be more valuable, such as smaller plants and peripheral plants operating in industries that are not the firm's main industry.
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Housing Booms and the U.S. Productivity Puzzle
January 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-04
The United States has been experiencing a slowdown in productivity growth for more than a decade. I exploit geographic variation across U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) to investigate the link between the 2006-2012 decline in house prices (the housing bust) and the productivity slowdown. Instrumental variable estimates support a causal relationship between the housing bust and the productivity slowdown. The results imply that one standard deviation decline in house prices translates into an increment of the productivity gap -- i.e. how much an MSA would have to grow to catch up with the trend -- by 6.9p.p., where the average gap is 14.51%. Using a newly-constructed capital expenditures measure at the MSA level, I find that the long investment slump that came out of the Great Recession explains an important part of this effect. Next, I document that the housing bust led to the investment slump and, ultimately, the productivity slowdown, mostly through the collapse in consumption expenditures that followed the bust. Lastly, I construct a quantitative general equilibrium model that rationalizes these empirical findings, and find that the housing bust is behind roughly 50 percent of the productivity slowdown.
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University Innovation, Local Economic Growth, and Entrepreneurship
June 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-10
Universities, often situated at the center of innovative clusters, are believed to be important drivers of local economic growth. This paper identifies the extent to which U.S. universities stimulate nearby economic activity using the interaction of a national shock to the spread of innovation from universities - the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 - with pre-determined variation both within a university in academic strengths and across universities in federal research funding. Using longitudinal establishment-level data from the Census, I find that longrun employment and payroll per worker around universities rise particularly rapidly after Bayh-Dole in industries more closely related to local university innovative strengths. The impact of
university innovation increases with geographic proximity to the university. Counties surrounding universities that received more pre-Bayh-Dole federal funding - particularly from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health - experienced faster employment growth after the law. Entering establishments - in particular multi-unit firm expansions - over the period from 1977 to 1997 were especially important in generating long-run employment growth, while incumbents experienced modest declines, consistent with creative destruction. Suggestive of their complementarities with universities, large establishments contributed more substantially to the total 20-year growth effect than did small establishments.
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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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