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Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'recession exposure'

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  • Working Paper

    Family Resources and Human Capital in Economic Downturns

    March 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-15

    I study how recessions impact the human capital of young adults and how these effects vary over the parent income gradient. Using a novel confidential linked survey dataset from U.S. Census, I document that the negative effects of worse local unemployment shocks on educational attainment are strongly concentrated among middle-class children, with losses in parental home equity being potentially important mechanisms. To probe the aggregate implications of these findings and assess policy implications, I develop a model of selection into college and life-cycle earnings that comprises endogenous parental transfers for education, multiple schooling options, and uncertainty in post-graduation employment outcomes. Simulating a recession in the model produces a 'hollowing out the middle' in lifecycle earnings in the aggregate, and educational borrowing constraints play a key role in this result. Counterfactual policies to expand college access in response to the recession can mitigate these effects but struggle to be cost effective.
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  • Working Paper

    Business Dynamics Statistics for Single-Unit Firms

    December 2022

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-22-57

    The Business Dynamics Statistics of Single Unit Firms (BDS-SU) is an experimental data product that provides information on employment and payroll dynamics for each quarter of the year at businesses that operate in one physical location. This paper describes the creation of the data tables and the value they add to the existing Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) product. We then present some analysis of the published statistics to provide context for the numbers and demonstrate how they can be used to understand both national and local business conditions, with a particular focus on 2020 and the recession induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We next examine how firms fared in this recession compared to the Great Recession that began in the fourth quarter of 2007. We also consider the heterogenous impact of the pandemic on various industries and areas of the country, showing which types of businesses in which locations were particularly hard hit. We examine business exit rates in some detail and consider why different metro areas experienced the pandemic in different ways. We also consider entry rates and look for evidence of a surge in new businesses as seen in other data sources. We finish by providing a preview of on-going research to match the BDS to worker demographics and show statistics on the relationship between the characteristics of the firm's workers and outcomes such as firm exit and net job creation.
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  • Working Paper

    The Matching Multiplier and the Amplification of Recessions

    June 2022

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-22-20

    This paper shows that the unequal incidence of recessions in the labor market amplifies aggregate shocks. Using administrative data from the United States, I document a positive covariance between worker marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) and their elasticities of earnings to GDP, which is a key moment for a new class of heterogeneous-agent models. I define the Matching Multiplier as the increase in the multiplier stemming from this matching of high MPC workers to more cyclical jobs. I show that this covariance is large enough to increase the aggregate MPC by 20 percent over an equal exposure benchmark.
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  • Working Paper

    Business Formation: A Tale of Two Recessions

    January 2021

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-21-01

    The trajectory of new business applications and transitions to employer businesses differ markedly during the Great Recession and COVID-19 Recession. Both applications and transitions to employer startups decreased slowly but persistently in the post-Lehman crisis period of the Great Recession. In contrast, during the COVID-19 Recession new applications initially declined but have since sharply rebounded, resulting in a surge in applications during 2020. Projected transitions to employer businesses also rise but this is dampened by a change in the composition of applications in 2020 towards applications that are more likely to be nonemployers.
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  • Working Paper

    Family Formation and the Great Recession

    December 2020

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-20-42R

    This paper studies how exposure to recessions as a young adult impacts long-term family formation in the context of the Great Recession. Using confidential linked survey data from U.S. Census, I document that exposure to a 1 pp larger unemployment shock in the Great Recession in one's early 20s is associated with a 0.8 pp decline in likelihood of marriage by their early 30s. These effects are not explained by substitution toward cohabitation with unmarried partners, are concentrated among whites, and are notably absent for individuals from high-income families. The estimated effects on fertility are also negative but imprecisely estimated. A back-of-the-envelope exercise suggests that these reductions in family formation may have increased the long-run impact of the Recession on consumption relative to its impact on individual earnings by a considerable extent.
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  • Working Paper

    Did Timing Matter? Life Cycle Differences in Effects of Exposure to the Great Recession

    September 2019

    Authors: Kevin Rinz

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-19-25

    Exposure to a recession can have persistent, negative consequences, but does the severity of those consequences depend on when in the life cycle a person is exposed? I estimate the effects of exposure to the Great Recession on employment and earnings outcomes for groups defined by year of birth over the ten years following the beginning of the recession. With the exception of the oldest workers, all groups experience reductions in earnings and employment due to local unemployment rate shocks during the recession. Younger workers experience the largest earnings losses in percent terms (up to 13 percent), in part because recession exposure makes them persistently less likely to work for high-paying employers even as their overall employment recovers more quickly than older workers'. Younger workers also experience reductions in earnings and employment due to changes in local labor market structure associated with the recession. These effects are substantially smaller in magnitude but more persistent than the effects of unemployment rate increases.
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  • Working Paper

    The Great Recession and a Missing Generation of Exporters

    August 2018

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-18-33

    The collapse of international trade surrounding the Great Recession has garnered significant attention. This paper studies firm entry and exit in foreign markets and their role in the post-recession recovery of U.S. exports using confidential microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau. We find that incumbent exporters account for the vast majority of the decline in export volumes during the crisis. The recession also induced a missing generation of exporters, with large increases in exits and a substantial decline in entries into foreign markets. New exporters during these years tended to have larger export volumes, however, compensating for the decline in the number of exporting firms. Thus, while entry and exit were important for determining the variety of U.S. goods that were exported, they were less important for the trajectory of aggregate foreign sales.
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  • Working Paper

    The Long-Run Effects of Recessions on Education and Income

    January 2017

    Authors: Bryan A. Stuart

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-17-52

    This paper examines the long-run effects of the 1980-1982 recession on education and income. Using confidential Census data, I estimate generalized difference-in-differences regressions that exploit variation across counties in the severity of the recession and across cohorts in age at the time of the recession. I find that children born in counties with a more severe recession are less likely to obtain a college degree and, as adults, earn less income and experience higher poverty rates. The negative effects on college graduation are most severe and essentially constant for individuals age 0-13 in 1979, suggesting that the underlying mechanisms are a decline in childhood human capital or a long-term decline in parental resources to pay for college. I find little evidence that states with more generous or more progressive transfer systems mitigated these long-run effects. The magnitude of my estimates and the large number of affected individuals suggest that the 1980-1982 recession depresses aggregate economic output today.
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  • Working Paper

    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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  • Working Paper

    OWNER CHARACTERISTICS AND FIRM PERFORMANCE DURING THE GREAT RECESSION

    September 2014

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-14-36

    Minority owned businesses are an increasing important component of the U.S. economy, growing at twice the rate of all U.S. businesses between 2002 and 2007. However, a growing literature indicates that minority-owned businesses may have been especially impacted by the Great Recession. As house prices declined, foreclosures fell disproportionately on urban minority neighborhoods and one of the sources of credit for business owners was severely constrained. Using 2002-2011 data from the Longitudinal Business Database linked to the 2002 Survey of Business Owners, this paper adds to the literature by examining the employment growth and survival of minority and women employer businesses during the last decade, including the Great Recession. At first glance, our preliminary findings suggest that black and women-owned businesses underperform white, male-owned businesses, that Asian-owned businesses outperform other groups, and that Hispanic-owned businesses outperform non-Hispanic ones in regards to employment growth. However, when we look only at continuing firms, black-owned businesses outperform white-owned businesses in terms of employment growth. At the same time, we also find that the recession appears to have impacted black-owned and Hispanic-owned businesses more severely than their counterparts, in terms of employment growth as well as survival. This is also the case for continuing black and Hispanic-owned firms.
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