Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'payroll'
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Authors
Lars Vilhuber - 13
John M. Abowd - 12
John Haltiwanger - 11
Kevin L. McKinney - 10
Kristin McCue - 6
Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 125
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Working PaperTapping Business and Household Surveys to Sharpen Our View of Work from Home
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-36
Timely business-level measures of work from home (WFH) are scarce for the U.S. economy. We review prior survey-based efforts to quantify the incidence and character of WFH and describe new questions that we developed and fielded for the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS). Drawing on more than 150,000 firm-level responses to the BTOS, we obtain four main findings. First, nearly a third of businesses have employees who work from home, with tremendous variation across sectors. The share of businesses with WFH employees is nearly ten times larger in the Information sector than in Accommodation and Food Services. Second, employees work from home about 1 day per week, on average, and businesses expect similar WFH levels in five years. Third, feasibility aside, businesses' largest concern with WFH relates to productivity. Seven percent of businesses find that onsite work is more productive, while two percent find that WFH is more productive. Fourth, there is a low level of tracking and monitoring of WFH activities, with 70% of firms reporting they do not track employee days in the office and 75% reporting they do not monitor employees when they work from home. These lessons serve as a starting point for enhancing WFH-related content in the American Community Survey and other household surveys.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Composition of Firm Workforces from 2006'2022: Findings from the Business Dynamics Statistics of Human Capital Experimental Product
April 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-20
We introduce the Business Dynamics Statistics of Human Capital (BDS-HC) tables, a new Census Bureau experimental product that provides public-use statistics on the workforce composition of firms and its relationship to business dynamics. We use administrative W-2 filings to combine population-level worker demographic data with longitudinal business data to estimate the demographic and educational composition of nearly all non-farm employer businesses in the United States between 2006 and 2022. We use this newly constructed data to document the evolution of employment, entry, and exit of employers based on their workforce compositions. We also provide new statistics on the interaction between firm and worker characteristics, including the composition of workers at startup firms. We find substantial changes between 2006 and 2022 in the distribution of employers along several dimensions, primarily driven by changing workforce compositions within continuing firms rather than the reallocation of employment between firms. We also highlight systematic differences in the business dynamics of firms by their workforce compositions, suggesting that different groups of workers face different economic environments due to their employers.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWork Organization and Cumulative Advantage
March 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-18
Over decades of wage stagnation, researchers have argued that reorganizing work can boost pay for disadvantaged workers. But upgrading jobs could inadvertently shift hiring away from those workers, exacerbating their disadvantage. We theorize how work organization affects cumulative advantage in the labor market, or the extent to which high-paying positions are increasingly allocated to already-advantaged workers. Specifically, raising technical skill demands exacerbates cumulative advantage by shifting hiring towards higher-skilled applicants. In contrast, when employers increase autonomy or skills learned on-the-job, they raise wages to buy worker consent or commitment, rather than pre-existing skill. To test this idea, we match administrative earnings to task descriptions from job posts. We compare earnings for workers hired into the same occupation and firm, but under different task allocations. When employers raise complexity and autonomy, new hires' starting earnings increase and grow faster. However, while the earnings boost from complex, technical tasks shifts employment toward workers with higher prior earnings, worker selection changes less for tasks learned on-the-job and very little for high autonomy tasks. These results demonstrate how reorganizing work can interrupt cumulative advantage.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWorkers' Job Prospects and Young Firm Dynamics
January 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-09
This paper investigates how worker beliefs and job prospects impact the wages and growth of young firms, as well as the aggregate economy. Building a heterogeneous-firm directed search model where workers gradually learn about firm types, I find that learning generates endogenous wage differentials for young firms. High-performing young firms must pay higher wages than equally high-performing old firms, while low-performing young firms offer lower wages than equally low-performing old firms. Reduced uncertainty or labor market frictions lower the wage differentials, thereby enhancing young firm dynamics and aggregate productivity. The results are consistent with U.S. administrative employee-employer matched data.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperExploring the Hiring, Pay, and Trading Patterns of U.S. Firms: The Dominance of Multinationals Engaged in Related-Party Trade
December 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-77
We link U.S. job records with both firm-level business register and customs records to construct a novel set of summary statistics and descriptive regressions that highlight the central role played by the small set of multinational firms (denoted RP XM firms) who engage in both importing and exporting with related parties in translating international trade shocks to shifts in labor demand. We find that RP XM firms 1) dominate trade volumes; 2) account for very disproportionate shares of national employment and payroll; 3) employ greater shares of workers in higher pay deciles; 4) disproportionately poach other firms' high paid workers; 5) offer higher raises to their existing workers. These hiring and pay patterns generally exist even among new RP XM firms, but strengthen with RP XM tenure, and continue to hold, albeit at smaller magnitudes, after conditioning on standard proxies for firm and worker productivity. Taken together, these findings reveal that RP XM status is a reliable proxy for the kind of firm that drives the initial labor market impacts of trade shocks, and that high paid workers are likely to be most directly exposed to such shocks.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperTip of the Iceberg: Tip Reporting at U.S. Restaurants, 2005-2018
November 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-68
Tipping is a significant form of compensation for many restaurant jobs, but it is poorly measured and therefore not well understood. We combine several large administrative and survey datasets and document patterns in tip reporting that are consistent with systematic under-reporting of tip income. Our analysis indicates that although the vast majority of tipped workers do report earning some tips, the dollar value of tips is under-reported and is sensitive to reporting incentives. In total, we estimate that about eight billion in tips paid at full-service, single-location, restaurants were not captured in tax data annually over the period 2005-2018. Due to changes in payment methods and reporting incentives, tip reporting has increased over time. Our findings have implications for downstream measures dependent on accurate measures of compensation including poverty measurement among tipped restaurant workers.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperDriving the Gig Economy
August 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-42
Using rich administrative tax data, we explore the effects of the introduction of online ridesharing platforms on entry, employment and earnings in the Taxi and Limousine Services industry. Ridesharing dramatically increased the pace of entry of workers into the industry. New entrants were more likely to be young, female, White and U.S. born, and to combine earnings from ridesharing with wage and salary earnings. Displaced workers have found ridesharing to be a substantially more attractive fallback option than driving a taxi. Ridesharing also affected the incumbent taxi driver workforce. The exit rates of low-earning taxi drivers increased following the introduction of ridesharing in their city; exit rates of high-earning taxi drivers were little affected. In cities without regulations limiting the size of the taxi fleet, both groups of drivers experienced earnings losses following the introduction of ridesharing. These losses were ameliorated or absent in more heavily regulated markets.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperExpanding the Frontier of Economic Statistics Using Big Data: A Case Study of Regional Employment
July 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-37
Big data offers potentially enormous benefits for improving economic measurement, but it also presents challenges (e.g., lack of representativeness and instability), implying that their value is not always clear. We propose a framework for quantifying the usefulness of these data sources for specific applications, relative to existing official sources. We specifically weigh the potential benefits of additional granularity and timeliness, while examining the accuracy associated with any new or improved estimates, relative to comparable accuracy produced in existing official statistics. We apply the methodology to employment estimates using data from a payroll processor, considering both the improvement of existing state-level estimates, but also the production of new, more timely, county-level estimates. We find that incorporating payroll data can improve existing state-level estimates by 11% based on out-of-sample mean absolute error, although the improvement is considerably higher for smaller state-industry cells. We also produce new county-level estimates that could provide more timely granular estimates than previously available. We develop a novel test to determine if these new county-level estimates have errors consistent with official series. Given the level of granularity, we cannot reject the hypothesis that the new county estimates have an accuracy in line with official measures, implying an expansion of the existing frontier. We demonstrate the practical importance of these experimental estimates by investigating a hypothetical application during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period in which more timely and granular information could have assisted in implementing effective policies. Relative to existing estimates, we find that the alternative payroll data series could help identify areas of the country where employment was lagging. Moreover, we also demonstrate the value of a more timely series.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperPayroll Tax Incidence: Evidence from Unemployment Insurance
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-35
Economic models assume that payroll tax burdens fall fully on workers, but where does tax incidence fall when taxes are firm-specific and time-varying? Unemployment insurance in the United States has the key feature of varying both across employers and over time, creating the potential for labor demand responses if tax costs cannot be fully passed through to worker wages. Using state policy changes and administrative data of matched employer-employee job spells, I study how employment and earnings respond to unexpected payroll tax increases for highly exposed employers. I find significant drops in employment growth driven by lower hiring, and minimal evidence of passthrough to earnings. The negative employment effects are strongest for young workers and single-establishment firms.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperU.S. Worker Mobility Across Establishments within Firms: Scope, Prevalence, and Effects on Worker Earnings
May 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-24
Multi-establishment firms account for around 60% of U.S. workers' primary employers, providing ample opportunity for workers to change their work location without changing their employer. Using U.S. matched employer-employee data, this paper analyzes workers' access to and use of such between-establishment job transitions, and estimates the effect on workers' earnings growth of greater access, as measured by proximity of employment at other within-firm establishments. While establishment transitions are not perfectly observed, we estimate that within-firm establishment transitions account for 7.8% percent of all job transitions and 18.2% of transitions originating from the largest firms. Using variation in worker's establishment locations within their firms' establishment network, we show that having a greater share of the firm's jobs in nearby establishments generates meaningful increases in workers' earnings: a worker at the 90th percentile of earnings gains from more proximate within-firm job opportunities can expect to enjoy 2% higher average earnings over the following five years than a worker at the 10th percentile with the same baseline earnings.View Full Paper PDF
