Papers Containing Tag(s): 'North American Industry Classification System'
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Viewing papers 321 through 330 of 393
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Working PaperWho Works for Startups? The Relation between Firm Age, Employee Age, and Growth
October 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-31
We present evidence that young employees are an important ingredient in the creation and growth of firms. Our results suggest that young employees possess attributes or skills, such as willingness to take risk or innovativeness, which make them relatively more valuable in young, high growth, firms. Young firms disproportionately hire young employees, controlling for firm size, industry, geography and time. Young employees in young firms command higher wages than young employees in older firms and earn wages that are relatively more equal to older employees within the same firm. Moreover, young employees disproportionately join young firms that subsequently exhibit higher growth and raise venture capital financing. Finally, we show that an increase in the regional supply of young workers increases the rate of new firm creation. Our results are relevant for investors and executives in young, high growth, firms, as well as policymakers interested in fostering entrepreneurship.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperModeling Single Establishment Firm Returns to the 2007 Economic Census
September 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-28
The Economic Census is one of the most important activities that the U.S. Census Bureau performs. It is critical for updating firm ownership/structure and industry information for a large number of businesses in the Census Bureau's Business Register, impacting most other economic programs. Also, it feeds into Bureau of Economic Analysis products, such as benchmark inputoutput accounts and Gross Domestic Product. The overall check-in rate for the 2007 Economic Census was just over 86%. Establishments owned by multi-location companies returned over 90% of their forms, as compared to the roughly two million single-establishment firms sampled in the Census that returned just over 80%. We model the check-in rate for single-establishment firms by using a large number of variables that might be correlated with whether or not a firm returns a form in the Economic Census. These variables are broadly categorized as the characteristics of firms, measures of external factors, and features of the survey design. We use the model for two purposes. First, by including many of the factors that may be correlated with returns we aim to focus limited advertising and outreach resources to low-return segments of the population. Second, we use the model to investigate the efficacy of an unplanned intervention expected to increase return rates: using certified mailing for one of the form follow-ups.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperNature Versus Nurture in the Origins of Highly Productive Businesses: An Exploratory Analysis of U.S. Manufacturing Establishments
September 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-26
This paper investigates the origins of productivity leaders, those that operate close to and help push out the production frontier. Do such businesses emerge as top performers from the very beginning of their lives, for example as the consequence of an outstanding founding idea, technology, or location? Or, at the other extreme, do they appear initially as completely average (or even underperformers) that exhibit gradual improvement as they learn and develop with age? To answer this question we draw upon five decades of U.S. Census of Manufacturing (CM) establishment-level data, tracing the productivity leaders of the most recent CM (2007) back over their observed life spans. We also examine possible industry-level correlates of variation in the extent of nature versus nurture that are suggested by theories of industry dynamics and economic growth.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Productivity Advantage and Global Scope of U.S. Multinational Firms
August 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-23
This paper examines whether the productivity of U.S. business establishments is related to the extent to which their parent firms are globally engaged--from being an exporter to being a fledgling multinational that has taken a few cautious forays into foreign markets to being a seasoned multinational with extensive foreign operations. Theory suggests that multinationals possess proprietary assets that confer a productivity advantage over their domestically-oriented rivals, and that this advantage is positively correlated with the global scope of a firm's operations. That is, those firms with the greatest productivity advantage are able to absorb the costs and overcome the risks of operating in a wide range of foreign countries, from those where it is relatively riskfree and economical to operate, to those where it is risky, difficult, and costly. This connection between the multinational's widening of its geographic scope of operations and its productivity can be self-reinforcing. Once a multinational has successfully operated in a risky environment, it may benefit from learning effects that can lower the cost and risk of further enlargement of geographic scope. The positive correlation between a firm's global engagement and its level of productivity has already been demonstrated. This paper extends that research by testing whether the correlation holds up when productivity is measured at the level of the individual establishment, rather than at the level of the consolidated business enterprise. It also examines whether the correlation between global engagement and productivity exists in non-manufacturing industries. Finally, it examines whether linkages between the multinational's domestic and foreign operations, in the form of imports of goods by the parent company from its foreign affiliates, enhance the productivity of the multinational's domestic business establishments. The findings confirm the positive correlation between global scope and productivity and demonstrate that it holds for both manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries. The effect of imports of goods from foreign affiliates on the productivity of the establishments of their parent firm depend on the geographic location of the affiliates: Imports from affiliates in high-income countries tend to be associated with high productivity whereas those from affiliates in low-income countries tend to be associated with low productivity. The study was made possible by combining BEA enterprise-level data on the U.S. operations of U.S. multinational firms with data on all U.S. business establishments collected by the Census Bureau in the U.S. economic census covering 2002.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperUsing the Survey of Plant Capacity to Measure Capital Utilization
July 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-19
Most capital in the United States is idle much of the time. By some measures, the average workweek of capital in U.S. manufacturing is as low as 55 hours per 168 hour week. The level and variability of capital utilization has important implications for understanding both the level of production and its cyclical fluctuations. This paper investigates a number of issues relating to aggregation of capital utilization measures from the Survey of Plant Capacity and makes recommendations on expanding and improving the published statistics deriving from the Survey of Plant Capacity. The paper documents a number of facts about properties of capital utilization. First, after growing for decades, capital utilization started to fall in mid 1990s. Second, capital utilization is a useful predictor of changes in capacity utilization and other factors of production. Third, adjustment of productivity measures for variable capital utilization improves statistical and economic properties of these measures. Fourth, the paper constructs weights to aggregate firm level capital utilization rates to industry and economy level, which is the major enhancement to available data.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperLEHD Infrastructure Files in the Census RDC: Overview of S2004 Snapshot
April 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-13
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau, with the support of several national research agencies, has built a set of infrastructure files using administrative data provided by state agencies, enhanced with information from other administrative data sources, demographic and economic (business) surveys and censuses. The LEHD Infrastructure Files provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of workers, employers, and their interaction in the U.S. economy. This document describes the structure and content of the 2004 Snapshot of the LEHD Infrastructure files as they are made available in the Census Bureau's Research Data Center network.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperBeyond Cobb-Douglas: Estimation of a CES Production Function with Factor Augmenting Technology
February 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-05
Both the recent literature on production function identification and a considerable body of other empirical work on firm expansion assume a Cobb-Douglas production function. Under this assumption, all technical differences are Hicks neutral. I provide evidence from US manufacturing plants against Cobb-Douglas and present an alternative production function that better fits the data. A Cobb Douglas production function has two empirical implications that I show do not hold in the data: a constant cost share of capital and strong comovement in labor productivity and capital productivity (revenue per unit of capital). Within four digit industries, differences in cost shares of capital are persistent over time. Both the capital share and labor productivity increase with revenue, but capital productivity does not. A CES production function with labor augmenting differences and an elasticity of substitution between labor and capital less than one can account for these facts. To identify the labor capital elasticity, I use variation in wages across local labor markets. Since the capital cost to labor cost ratio falls with local area wages, I strongly reject Cobb-Douglas: capital and labor are complements. Now productivity differences are no longer neutral, which has implications on how productivity affects firms' decisions to expand or contract. Non neutral technical improvements will result in higher stocks of capital but not necessarily more hiring of labor. Specifying the correct form of the production function is more generally important for empirical work, as I demonstrate by applying my methodology to address questions of misallocation of capital.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperTowards Unrestricted Public Use Business Microdata: The Synthetic Longitudinal Business Database
February 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-04
In most countries, national statistical agencies do not release establishment-level business microdata, because doing so represents too large a risk to establishments\' confidentiality. One approach with the potential for overcoming these risks is to release synthetic data; that is, the released establishment data are simulated from statistical models designed to mimic the distributions of the underlying real microdata. In this article, we describe an application of this strategy to create a public use file for the Longitudinal Business Database, an annual economic census of establishments in the United States comprising more than 20 million records dating back to 1976. The U.S. Bureau of the Census and the Internal Revenue Service recently approved the release of these synthetic microdata for public use, making the synthetic Longitudinal Business Database the first-ever business microdata set publicly released in the United States. We describe how we created the synthetic data, evaluated analytical validity, and assessed disclosure risk.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperPlant-Level Productivity and Imputation of Missing Data in the Census of Manufactures
January 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-02
In the U.S. Census of Manufactures, the Census Bureau imputes missing values using a combination of mean imputation, ratio imputation, and conditional mean imputation. It is wellknown that imputations based on these methods can result in underestimation of variability and potential bias in multivariate inferences. We show that this appears to be the case for the existing imputations in the Census of Manufactures. We then present an alternative strategy for handling the missing data based on multiple imputation. Specifically, we impute missing values via sequences of classification and regression trees, which offer a computationally straightforward and flexible approach for semi-automatic, large-scale multiple imputation. We also present an approach to evaluating these imputations based on posterior predictive checks. We use the multiple imputations, and the imputations currently employed by the Census Bureau, to estimate production function parameters and productivity dispersions. The results suggest that the two approaches provide quite different answers about productivity.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWorkplace Concentration of Immigrants
November 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-39R
To what extent do immigrants and the native-born work in separate workplaces? Do worker and employer characteristics explain the degree of workplace concentration? We explore these questions using a matched employer-employee database that extensively covers employers in selected MSAs. We find that immigrants are much more likely to have immigrant coworkers than are natives, and are particularly likely to work with their compatriots. We find much higher levels of concentration for small businesses than for large ones, that concentration varies substantially across industries, and that concentration is particularly high among immigrants with limited English skills. We also find evidence that neighborhood job networks are strongly positively associated with concentration. The effects of networks and language remain strong when type is defined by country of origin rather than simply immigrant status. The importance of these factors varies by immigrant country of origin'for example, not speaking English well has a particularly strong association with concentration for immigrants from Asian countries. Controlling for differences across MSAs, we find that observable employer and employee characteristics account for about half of the difference between immigrants and natives in the likelihood of having immigrant coworkers, with differences in industry, residential segregation and English speaking skills being the most important factors.View Full Paper PDF
