Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Bureau of Labor Statistics'
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Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 327
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Working PaperPrivate Equity and Workers: Modeling and Measuring Monopsony, Implicit Contracts, and Efficient Reallocation
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-37
We measure the real effects of private equity buyouts on worker outcomes by building a new database that links transactions to matched employer-employee data in the United States. To guide our empirical analysis, we derive testable implications from three theories in which private equity managers alter worker outcomes: (1) exertion of monopsony power in concentrated markets, (2) breach of implicit contracts with targeted groups of workers, including managers and top earners, and (3) efficient reallocation of workers across plants. We do not find any evidence that private equity-backed firms vary wages and employment based on local labor market power proxies. Wage losses are also very similar for managers and top earners. Instead, we find strong evidence that private equity managers downsize less productive plants relative to productive plants while simultaneously reallocating high-wage workers to more productive plants. We conclude that post-buyout employment and wage dynamics are consistent with professional investors providing incentives to increase productivity and monitor the companies in which they invest.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperTapping Business and Household Surveys to Sharpen Our View of Work from Home
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-36
Timely business-level measures of work from home (WFH) are scarce for the U.S. economy. We review prior survey-based efforts to quantify the incidence and character of WFH and describe new questions that we developed and fielded for the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS). Drawing on more than 150,000 firm-level responses to the BTOS, we obtain four main findings. First, nearly a third of businesses have employees who work from home, with tremendous variation across sectors. The share of businesses with WFH employees is nearly ten times larger in the Information sector than in Accommodation and Food Services. Second, employees work from home about 1 day per week, on average, and businesses expect similar WFH levels in five years. Third, feasibility aside, businesses' largest concern with WFH relates to productivity. Seven percent of businesses find that onsite work is more productive, while two percent find that WFH is more productive. Fourth, there is a low level of tracking and monitoring of WFH activities, with 70% of firms reporting they do not track employee days in the office and 75% reporting they do not monitor employees when they work from home. These lessons serve as a starting point for enhancing WFH-related content in the American Community Survey and other household surveys.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Rising Returns to R&D: Ideas Are Not Getting Harder to Find
May 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-29
R&D investment has grown robustly, yet aggregate productivity growth has stagnated. Is this because 'ideas are getting harder to find'? This paper uses micro-data from the US Census Bureau to explore the relationship between R&D and productivity in the manufacturing sector from 1976 to 2018. We find that both the elasticity of output (TFP) with respect to R&D and the marginal returns to R&D have risen sharply. Exploring factors affecting returns, we conclude that R&D obsolescence rates must have risen. Using a novel estimation approach, we find consistent evidence of sharply rising technological rivalry. These findings suggest that R&D has become more effective at finding productivity-enhancing ideas but these ideas may also render rivals' technologies obsolete, making innovations more transient.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSize Matters: Matching Externalities and the Advantages of Large Labor Markets
April 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-22
Economists have long hypothesized that large and thick labor markets facilitate the matching between workers and firms. We use administrative data from the LEHD to compare the job search outcomes of workers originally in large and small markets who lost their jobs due to a firm closure. We define a labor market as the Commuting Zone'industry pair in the quarter before the closure. To account for the possible sorting of high-quality workers into larger markets, the effect of market size is identified by comparing workers in large and small markets within the same CZ, conditional on workers fixed effects. In the six quarters before their firm's closure, workers in small and large markets have a similar probability of employment and quarterly earnings. Following the closure, workers in larger markets experience significantly shorter non-employment spells and smaller earning losses than workers in smaller markets, indicating that larger markets partially insure workers against idiosyncratic employment shocks. A 1 percent increase in market size results in a 0.015 and 0.023 percentage points increase in the 1-year re-employment probability of high school and college graduates, respectively. Displaced workers in larger markets also experience a significantly lower need for relocation to a different CZ. Conditional on finding a new job, the quality of the new worker-firm match is higher in larger markets, as proxied by a higher probability that the new match lasts more than one year; the new industry is the same as the old one; and the new industry is a 'good fit' for the worker's college major. Consistent with the notion that market size should be particularly consequential for more specialized workers, we find that the effects are larger in industries where human capital is more specialized and less portable. Our findings may help explain the geographical agglomeration of industries'especially those that make intensive use of highly specialized workers'and validate one of the mechanisms that urban economists have proposed for the existence of agglomeration economies.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWork Organization and Cumulative Advantage
March 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-18
Over decades of wage stagnation, researchers have argued that reorganizing work can boost pay for disadvantaged workers. But upgrading jobs could inadvertently shift hiring away from those workers, exacerbating their disadvantage. We theorize how work organization affects cumulative advantage in the labor market, or the extent to which high-paying positions are increasingly allocated to already-advantaged workers. Specifically, raising technical skill demands exacerbates cumulative advantage by shifting hiring towards higher-skilled applicants. In contrast, when employers increase autonomy or skills learned on-the-job, they raise wages to buy worker consent or commitment, rather than pre-existing skill. To test this idea, we match administrative earnings to task descriptions from job posts. We compare earnings for workers hired into the same occupation and firm, but under different task allocations. When employers raise complexity and autonomy, new hires' starting earnings increase and grow faster. However, while the earnings boost from complex, technical tasks shifts employment toward workers with higher prior earnings, worker selection changes less for tasks learned on-the-job and very little for high autonomy tasks. These results demonstrate how reorganizing work can interrupt cumulative advantage.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Intangible Divide: Why Do So Few Firms Invest in Innovation?
February 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-15
Investments in software, R&D, and advertising have surged, nearing half of U.S. private nonresidential investment. Yet just a few hundred firms dominate this growth. Most firms, including large ones, regularly invest little in capitalized software and R&D, widening this 'intangible divide' despite falling intangible prices. Using comprehensive US Census microdata, we document these patterns and explore factors associated with intangible investment. We find that firms invest significantly less in innovation-related intangibles when their rivals invest more. One firm's investment can obsolesce rivals' investments, reducing returns. This negative pecuniary externality worsens the intangible divide, potentially leading to significant misallocation.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWorkers' Job Prospects and Young Firm Dynamics
January 2025
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.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperFood Security Status Across the Rural-Urban Continuum Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic
January 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-01
Background: Food security, defined as consistent access to sufficient food to support an active life, is a crucial social determinant of health. A key dimension affecting food security is position along the rural-urban continuum, as there are important socio-economic and environmental differences between communities related to urbanicity or rurality that impact food access. The COVID-19 pandemic created social and economic shocks that altered financial and food security, which may have had differential effects by rurality and urbanicity. However, there has been limited research on how food security differs across the shades of the rural-urban community spectrum, as most often researchers have characterized communities as either urban or rural. Methods: In this study, which linked restricted use Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement data to census-tract level United States Department of Agriculture Rural-Urban Commuting Area codes, we estimated the prevalence of household food security across temporal (2015-2019 versus 2020-2021) and socio-spatial (urban, large rural city/town, small rural town, or isolated rural town/area) dimensions in order to characterize variations before and during the COVID-19 pandemic by urbanicity/rurality. We report prevalences as point estimates with 95% confidence intervals. Results: The prevalence of food security was 87.7% (87.5-88.0%) in 2015-2019 and 88.8% (88.4-89.3%) in 2020-2021 for urban areas, 85.5% (84.7-86.2%) in 2015-2019 and 87.1% (85.7-88.3%) in 2020-2021 for large rural towns/cities, 82.8% (81.5-84.1%) in 2015-2019 and 87.3% (85.7-89.2%) in 2020-2021 for small rural towns, and 87.6% (86.3-88.8%) in 2015-2019 and 90.9% (88.7-92.7%) in 2020-2021 for isolated rural towns/areas. Conclusion: These findings show that rural communities experiences of food security vary and aggregating households in these environments may mask areas of concern and concentrated need.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperPlaces versus People: The Ins and Outs of Labor Market Adjustment to Globalization
December 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-78
We analyze the distinct adjustment paths of U.S. labor markets (places) and U.S. workers (people) to increased Chinese import competition during the 2000s. Using comprehensive register data for 2000'2019, we document that employment levels more than fully rebound in trade-exposed places after 2010, while employment-to-population ratios remain depressed and manufacturing employment further atrophies. The adjustment of places to trade shocks is generational: affected areas recover primarily by adding workers to non-manufacturing who were below working age when the shock occurred. Entrants are disproportionately native-born Hispanics, foreign-born immigrants, women, and the college-educated, who find employment in relatively low-wage service sectors like medical services, education, retail, and hospitality. Using the panel structure of the employer-employee data, we decompose changes in the employment composition of places into trade-induced shifts in the gross flows of people across sectors, locations, and non-employment status. Contrary to standard models, trade shocks reduce geographic mobility, with both in- and out-migration remaining depressed through 2019. The employment recovery instead stems almost entirely from young adults and foreign-born immigrants taking their first U.S. jobs in affected areas, with minimal contributions from cross-sector transitions of former manufacturing workers. Although worker inflows into non-manufacturing more than fully offset manufacturing employment losses in trade-exposed locations after 2010, incumbent workers neither fully recover earnings losses nor predominately exit the labor market, but rather age in place as communities undergo rapid demographic and industrial transitions.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperFinancing, 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.View Full Paper PDF
