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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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Documenting the Business Register and Related Economic Business Data
March 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-17
The Business Register (BR) is a comprehensive database of business establishments in the United States and provides resources for the U.S. Census Bureau's economic programs for sample selection, research, and survey operations. It is maintained using information from several federal agencies including the Census Bureau, Internal Revenue Service, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Social Security Administration. This paper provides a detailed description of the sources and functions of the BR. An overview of the BR as a linking tool and bridge to other Census Bureau data for additional business characteristics is also given.
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Learning and the Value of Relationships in International Trade
February 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-11
How valuable are long-term supplier relationships? To address this question, this paper explores relationships between U.S. importers and their suppliers abroad. We establish several facts: almost half of U.S. imports involve relationships three years or older, relationship survival and traded quantity increase as a relationship ages, and long-term relationships were more resilient in the 2008-09 financial crisis. We present a model of importer learning and calibrate it using our data. We estimate large differences in the value of relationships across countries. Counterfactuals show that relationships are central to trade dynamics.
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Business Dynamics Statistics of High Tech Industries
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-55
Modern market economies are characterized by the reallocation of resources from less productive, less valuable activities to more productive, more valuable ones. Businesses in the High Technology sector play a particularly important role in this reallocation by introducing new products and services that impact the entire economy. Tracking the performance of this sector is therefore of primary importance, especially in light of recent evidence that suggests a slowdown in business dynamism in High Tech industries. The Census Bureau produces the Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS), a suite of data products that track job creation, job destruction, startups, and exits by firm and establishment characteristics including sector, firm age, and firm size. In this paper we describe the methodologies used to produce a new extension to the BDS focused on businesses in High Technology industries.
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Making a Motivated Manager: A Census Data Investigation into Efficiency Differences Between Franchisee and Franchisor-Owned Restaurants
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-54
While there has been significant research on the reasons for franchising, little work has examined the effects of franchising on establishment performance. This paper attempts to fill that gap. We use restricted-access US Census Bureau microdata from the 2007 Census of Retail Trade to examine establishment-level productivity of franchisee- and franchisor-owned restaurants. We do this by employing a two-stage data envelopment analysis model where the first stage uses DEA to measure each establishment's efficiency. The DEA efficiency score is then used as the second-stage dependent variable. The results show a strong and robust effect attributed to franchisee ownership for full service restaurants, but a smaller and insignificant difference for limited service restaurants. We believe the differences in task programability between limited and full service restaurants results in a very different role for managers/franchisees and is the driving factor behind the different results.
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Evidence for the Effects of Mergers on Market Power and Efficiency
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-43
Study of the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on productivity and market power has been complicated by the difficulty of separating these two effects. We use newly-developed techniques to separately estimate productivity and markups across a wide range of industries using confidential data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Employing a difference-in-differences framework, we find that M&As are associated with increases in average markups, but find little evidence for effects on plant-level productivity. We also examine whether M&As increase efficiency through reallocation of production to more efficient plants or through reductions in administrative operations, but again find little evidence for these channels, on average. The results are robust to a range of approaches to
address the endogeneity of firms' merger decisions.
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The Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS): An Overview*
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-28
Understanding productivity and business dynamics requires measuring production outputs and inputs. Through its surveys and use of administrative data, the Census Bureau collects information on production outputs and inputs including labor, capital, energy, and materials. With the introduction of the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS), the Census Bureau added information on another component of production: management. It has long been hypothesized that management is an important component of firm success, but until recently the study of management was confined to hypotheses, anecdotes, and case studies. Building upon the work of Bloom and Van Reenen (2007), the first-ever large scale survey of management practices in the United States, the MOPS, was conducted by the Census Bureau for 2010. A second, enhanced version of the MOPS is being conducted for 2015. The enhancement includes two new topics related to management: data and decision making (DDD) and uncertainty. As information technology has expanded plants are increasingly able to utilize data in their decision making. Structured management practices have been found to be complementary to DDD in earlier studies. Uncertainty has policy implications because uncertainty is found to be associated with reduced investment and employment. Uncertainty also plays a role in the targeting component of management.
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The Impact of Bank Credit on Labor Reallocation and Aggregate Industry Productivity
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-26
Using a difference-in-difference methodology, we find that the state-level deregulation of local U.S. banking markets leads to significant increases in the reallocation of labor within local industries towards small firms with higher marginal products of labor. Using plant-level data, we propose and examine an approach that quantifies the industry productivity gains from labor reallocation and find that these gains are economically important. Our analysis suggests that labor reallocation is a significant channel through which local banking markets affect the aggregate productivity and performance of local industries.
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Data in Action: Data-Driven Decision Making in U.S. Manufacturing
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-06
Manufacturing in America has become significantly more data-intensive. We investigate the adoption, performance effects and organizational complementarities of data-driven decision making (DDD) in the U.S. Using data collected by the Census Bureau for 2005 and 2010, we observe the extent to which manufacturing firms track and use data to guide decision making, as well as their investments in information technology (IT) and the use of other structured management practices. Examining a representative sample of over 18,000 plans, we find that adoption of DDD is earlier and more prevalent among larger, older plants belonging to multi-unit firms. Smaller single-establishment firms adopt later but have a higher correlation with performance than similar non-adopters. Using a fixed-effects estimator, we find the average value-added for later DDD adopters to be 3% greater than non-adopters, controlling for other inputs to production. This effect is distinct from that associated with IT and other structured management practices and is concentrated among single-unit firms. Performance improves after plants adopt DDD, but not before ' consistent with a causal relationship. However, DDD-related performance differentials decrease over time for early and late adopters, consistent with firm learning and development of organizational complementarities. Formal complementarity tests suggest that DDD and high levels of IT capital reinforce each other, as do DDD and skilled workers. For some industries, the benefits of DDD adoption appear to be greater for plants that delegate some decision making to frontline workers.
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Allocation of Company Research and Development Expenditures to Industries Using a Tobit Model
November 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-42
This paper uses Census microdata and a regression-based approach to assign multi-division firms' pre-2008 Research and Development (R&D) expenditures to more than one industry. Since multi-division firms conduct R&D in more than one industry, assigning R&D to corresponding industries provides a more accurate representation of where R&D actually takes place and provides a consistent time-series with the National Science Foundation R&D by line of business information. Firm R&D is allocated to industries on the basis of observed industry payroll, as befits the historic importance of payroll in Census assignments of firms to industry. The results demonstrate that the method of assigning R&D to industries on the basis of payroll works well in earlier years, but becomes less effective over time as firms outsource their manufacturing function.
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