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Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'firms age'

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Viewing papers 1 through 9 of 9


  • Working Paper

    Workers' Job Prospects and Young Firm Dynamics

    January 2025

    Authors: Seula Kim

    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.
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  • Working Paper

    Financing, Ownership, and Performance: A Novel, Longitudinal Firm-Level Database

    December 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-73

    The Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) underpins many studies of firm-level behavior. It tracks longitudinally all employers in the nonfarm private sector but lacks information about business financing and owner characteristics. We address this shortcoming by linking LBD observations to firm-level data drawn from several large Census Bureau surveys. The resulting Longitudinal Employer, Owner, and Financing (LEOF) database contains more than 3 million observations at the firm-year level with information about start-up financing, current financing, owner demographics, ownership structure, profitability, and owner aspirations ' all linked to annual firm-level employment data since the firm hired its first employee. Using the LEOF database, we document trends in owner demographics and financing patterns and investigate how these business characteristics relate to firm-level employment outcomes.
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  • Working Paper

    High-Growth Firms in the United States: Key Trends and New Data Opportunities

    March 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-11

    Using administrative data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we introduce a new public-use database that tracks activities across firm growth distributions over time and by firm and establishment characteristics. With these new data, we uncover several key trends on high-growth firms'critical engines of innovation and economic growth. First, the share of firms that are high-growth has steadily decreased over the past four decades, driven not only by falling firm entry rates but also languishing growth among existing firms. Second, this decline is particularly pronounced among young and small firms, while the share of high-growth firms has been relatively stable among large and old firms. Third, the decline in high-growth firms is found in all sectors, but the information sector has shown a modest rebound beginning in 2010. Fourth, there is significant variation in high-growth firm activity across states, with California, Texas, and Florida having high shares of high-growth firms. We highlight several areas for future research enabled by these new data.
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  • Working Paper

    Job Creation, Small vs. Large vs. Young, and the SBA

    September 2015

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-15-24

    Analyzing a list of all Small Business Administration (SBA) loans in 1991 to 2009 linked with annual information on all U.S. employers from 1976 to 2012, we apply detailed matching and regression methods to estimate the variation in SBA loan effects on job creation and firm survival across firm age and size groups. The estimated number of jobs created per million dollars of loans within the small business sector generally increases with size and decreases in age. The results suggest that the growth of small, mature firms is least financially constrained, and that faster growing firms experience the greatest financial constraints to growth. The estimated association between survival and loan amount is larger for younger and smaller firms facing the 'valley of death.'
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  • Working Paper

    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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  • Working Paper

    Information Technology, Capabilities and Asset Ownership: Evidence from Taxicab Fleets

    November 2009

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-09-39

    We examine how information technology (IT) influences asset ownership through its impact on firms' and agents' capabilities. In particular, we propose that when IT is a substitute for agents' industry-specific human capital, IT adoption leads to increased vertical integration. We test this prediction using micro data on vehicle ownership patterns from the Economic Census during a period when computerized dispatching systems were first adopted by taxicab firms. The empirical tests exploit exogenous variation in local market conditions, to identify the impact of dispatching technology on firm asset ownership. The results show that firms increase the proportion of taxicabs owned by 12% when they adopt new computerized dispatching systems. The findings suggest that firms increasingly vertically integrate when they acquire resources that substitute for their agents' capabilities.
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  • Working Paper

    Labor Market Rigidities and the Employment Behavior of Older Workers

    July 2007

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-07-21

    The labor market is often asserted to be characterized by rigidities that make it difficult for older workers to carry out their desired trajectory from work to retirement. An important source of rigidity is restrictions on hours of work imposed by firms that use team production or face high fixed costs of employment. Such rigidities are difficult to measure directly. We develop a model of the labor market in which technological rigidity affects the age structure of a firm's work force in equilibrium. Firms using relatively flexible technology care only about total hours of labor input, but not hours of work per worker. Older workers with a desire for short or flexible hours of work are attracted to such firms. Firms using a more rigid technology involving team production impose a minimum hours constraint, and as a result tend to have a younger age structure. A testable hypothesis of the model is that the hazard of separation of older workers is lower in firms with an older age structure. We use matched worker-firm data to test this hypothesis, and find support for it. Specification tests and alternative proxies for labor market rigidity support our interpretation of the effect of firm age structure on the separation propensity These results provide indirect but suggestive evidence of the importance of labor market rigidities.
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  • Working Paper

    MEASURES OF JOB FLOW DYNAMICS IN THE U.S.*

    January 1999

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-99-01

    This paper uses the new Longitudinal Establishment and Enterprise Microdata (LEEM) at CES to investigate gross and net job flows for the U. S. economy. Much of the previous work on U.S. job flows has been based on analysis of the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD), which is limited to establishments in the manufacturing sector. The LEEM is the first high-quality, nationwide, comprehensive database for both manufacturing and non-manufacturing that is suitable for measuring annual job flows. We utilize the LEEM data to measure recent gross and net job flows for the entire U. S. economy. We then examine the relationships between firm size, establishment size, and establishment age, and investigate differences resulting from use of two alternative methods for classification of job flows by size of firm and establishment. Cell-based regression analysis is used to help distinguish among the effects of age, firm size, and establishment size on gross and net job flows in existing establishments. We find that gross job flow rates decline with age, and with increasing establishment size when controlling for age differences, whether initial size or mean size classification is utilized. Firm size differences contribute little or nothing additional when establishment size and age are controlled for. However, the relationship of net job growth to business size is very sensitive to the size classification method, even when data and all other methodology are identical. When mean size classification is used, the coefficient on establishment size for net job growth is generally positive, but when initial size is used, this coefficient is negative. These results shed light on some of the apparently conflicting findings in the literature on the relationship between net growth and the size of businesses.
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  • Working Paper

    Business Failure In The 1992 Establishment Universe Sources Of Population Heterogeneity

    December 1996

    Authors: Alfred R Nucci

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-96-13

    This study shows that establishment dissolution declines with age and that age at dissolution differs for broad industry and geography groups, establishment affiliation status, and establishment size. The paper uses Bureau of the Census Standard Statistical Establishment List datasets, a census of establishments with employment for the United States for the year 1992. Hence, the findings constitute a comprehensive source of information on the relation between age and dissolution and place in context similar findings of studies restricted to specific industries and/or geographic areas.
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