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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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Industry Shakeouts after an Innovation Breakthrough
November 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-70
Conventional wisdom suggests that after a technological breakthrough, the number of active firms first surges, and then sharply declines, in what is known as a 'shakeout'. This paper challenges that notion with new empirical evidence from across the U.S. economy, revealing that shakeouts are the exception, not the rule. I develop a statistical strategy to detect breakthroughs by isolating sustained anomalies in net firm entry rates, offering a robust alternative to narrative-driven approaches that can be applied to all industries. The results of this strategy, which reliably align with well-documented breakthroughs and remain consistent across various validation tests, uncover a novel trend: the number of entry-driven breakthroughs has been declining over time. The variability and frequent absence of shakeouts across breakthrough industries are consistent with breakthroughs primarily occurring in industries with low returns to scale and with modest learning curves, shifting the narrative on the nature of innovation over the past forty years in the U.S.
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Socially Responsible Investment and Gender Equality in the United States Census
August 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-44
With administrative data, we test whether institutional ownership with a social preference is related to employee-level gender equality. We show that the gender pay gap, which is an unexplained part of the lower wages of female employees, does not have a significant relation with socially responsible investments. Next, we show that female directorship strengthens the relation between socially responsible investments and the gender pay gap. When there are female directors, socially responsible investments have a robust correlation with a lower gender pay gap. This is because female directorship alleviates information asymmetry in gender equality.
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Employer Dominance and Worker Earnings in Finance
August 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-41
Large firms in the U.S. financial system achieve substantial economic gains. Their dominance sets them apart while also raising concerns about the suppression of worker earnings. Utilizing administrative data, this study reveals that the largest financial firms pay workers an average of 30.2% more than their smallest counterparts, significantly exceeding the 7.9% disparity in nonfinance sectors. This positive size-earnings relationship is consistently more pronounced in finance, even during the 2008 crisis or compared to the hightech sector. Evidence suggests that large financial firms' excessive gains, coupled with their workers' sought-after skills, explain this distinct relationship.
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The Impact of Parental Resources on Human Capital Investment and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Great Recession
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-34
I study the impact of parents' financial resources during adolescence on postsecondary human capital investment and labor market outcomes, using house value changes during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 as a natural experiment. I use several restricted-access datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau to create a novel dataset that includes intergenerational linkages between children and their parents. This data allows me to exploit house value variation within labor markets, addressing the identification concern that local house values are related to local economic conditions. I find that the average decrease to parents' home values lead to persistent decreases in bachelor's degree attainment of 1.26%, earnings of 1.96%, and full-time employment of 1.32%. Children of parents suffering larger house value shocks are more likely to substitute into two-year degree programs, drop out of college, or be enrolled in a college program in their late 20s.
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After the Storm: How Emergency Liquidity Helps Small Businesses Following Natural Disasters
April 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-20
Does emergency credit prevent long-term financial distress? We study the causal effects of government-provided recovery loans to small businesses following natural disasters. The rapid financial injection might enable viable firms to survive and grow or might hobble precarious firms with more risk and interest obligations. We show that the loans reduce exit and bankruptcy, increase employment and revenue, unlock private credit, and reduce delinquency. These effects, especially the crowding-in of private credit, appear to reflect resolving uncertainty about repair. We do not find capital reallocation away from neighboring firms and see some evidence of positive spillovers on local entry.
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Research and/or Development? Financial Frictions and Innovation Investment
August 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-39
U.S. firms have reduced their investment in scientific research ('R') compared to product development ('D'), raising questions about the returns to each type of investment, and about the reasons for this shift. We use Census data that disaggregates 'R' from 'D' to study how US firms adjust their innovation investments in response to an external increase in funding cost. Companies with greater demand for refinancing during the 2008 financial crisis, made larger cuts to R&D investment. This reduction in R&D is achieved almost entirely by reducing investment in research. Development remains essentially unchanged. If other firms patenting similar technologies must refinance, however, then Development investment declines. We interpret the latter result as evidence of technological competition: firms are reluctant to cut Development expenditures when that could place them at a disadvantage compared to potential rivals.
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Investment and Subjective Uncertainty
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-52
A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers' subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed new survey measure of subjective uncertainty collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for approximately 25,000 manufacturing plants. We find three key results. First, investment is strongly and robustly negatively associated with higher uncertainty, with a two standard deviation increase in uncertainty associated with about a 6% reduction in investment. Second, uncertainty is also negatively related to employment growth and overall shipments (sales) growth, which highlights the damaging impact of uncertainty on firm growth. Third, flexible inputs like rental capital and temporary workers show a positive relationship to uncertainty, demonstrating that businesses switch from less flexible to more flexible factor inputs at higher levels of uncertainty.
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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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Black Entrepreneurs, Job Creation, and Financial Constraints
May 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-11
Black-owned businesses tend to operate with less finance and employ fewer workers than those owned by Whites. Motivated by a simple conceptual framework, we document these facts and show they are causally connected using large firm-level surveys linked to universal employer data from the Census Bureau. We find that the racial financing gap is most pronounced at start-up and tends to narrow with firm age. At any age, Black-owned firms are less likely to receive bank loans, more likely to refrain from applying because they expect denial, and more likely to report that lack of finance reduces their profitability. Yet the observable characteristics of Black entrepreneurs are similar in most respects to Whites, and in some ways - higher education, growth-oriented motivations, and involvement in the business - would seem to imply higher, not lower, demand for finance. Concerning employment, we find that Black-owned firms have on average about 12 percent fewer employees than those owned by Whites, but the difference drops when controlling for firm age and other characteristics. However, when the analysis holds financial variables constant, the results imply that equally well-financed Black-owned rms would be larger than White-owned by about seven percent. Exploiting the credit supply shock of changing assignment to Community Reinvestment Act treatment through a Regression Discontinuity Design in a firm-level panel regression framework, we find that expanded credit access raises employment 5-7 percentage points more at Black-owned businesses than White-owned firms in treated neighborhoods.
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