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New U.S. Business Establishments: Surging or Stalling?
June 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-36
Since the 1990s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has reported much more rapid growth in U.S. private sector employer establishments than has the Census Bureau' the gap reached roughly 1.6 million by 2023. Using linked BLS-Census microdata, we document two main drivers. First, a large and growing number of employers providing services to the elderly and persons with disabilities are in scope for the BLS frame but not the Census Bureau's. Second, many firms appear with substantially more establishments in the BLS frame. These discrepancies substantially affect the measured establishment size distribution and quantitative policy analysis.
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Did Foreigners Pay America's Tariffs? Quantity Discounts, Scale Economies and Incomplete Pass-Through
February 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-17
Transaction-level quantity discounts are a pervasive feature of US trade, shaping both price variation and tariff incidence. Using administrative microdata, we show that these discounts reflect transaction-level scale economies rather than market power. Accounting for these micro-level economies resolves a key puzzle: while observed import prices rose one-for-one with 2018-2019 US tariffs, we show this was driven by the loss of scale economies as transaction sizes collapsed. Controlling for this scale effect, the strategic pass-through of tariffs to scale-free prices falls to 60 percent, implying foreign exporters absorbed a significant share of the burden through reduced markups.
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Food Fight: U.S. Exporters' Adjustments to Russia's 2014 Agricultural Import Ban
December 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-79
This paper examines the impact of Russia's 2014 food-import ban on U.S. firms that exported banned products to Russia. Using confidential customs transaction data, we implement triple-difference and dosage-response approaches to identify how firms adjust to the sudden loss of a market. Following the ban, treated firms experienced a 30 percentage-point decrease in the probability of exporting banned food to Russia relative to control firms. However, there is substantial heterogeneity by pre-ban reliance on the Russian market: heavily reliant firms were significantly less likely to survive once the ban was in place, and survivors experienced large reductions in revenue (19%) and total export value (49%) for each standard deviation increase in Russian market exposure. We find evidence of export redirection to neighboring countries, though it is insufficient to offset losses. Any negative impacts on survivors dissipate by five years post-ban.
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Borrowing Constraints, Markups, and Misallocation
December 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-75
We document new facts that link firms' markups to borrowing constraints: (1) less constrained firms within an industry have higher markups, especially in industries where assets are difficult to borrow against and firms rely more on earnings to borrow; (2) markup dispersion is also higher in industries where firms rely more on earnings to borrow. We explain these relationships using a standard Kimball demand model augmented with borrowing against assets and earnings. The key mechanism is a two-way feedback between markups and borrowing constraints. First, less constrained firms charge higher markups, as looser constraints allow them to attain larger market shares. Second, higher markups relax borrowing constraints when firms rely on earnings to borrow, as those with higher markups have higher earnings. This two-way feedback lowers TFP losses from markup dispersion, particularly when firms rely on earnings to borrow.
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'Oh, Give Me a Home (Trade Share)': Differential Import Price Inflation and Gains from Trade Across U.S. Households
July 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-47
Consumers are differentially exposed to trade based on their expenditures, but there is little data on how such trade exposure differs across consumer groups and over time. In this paper, we construct 'home trade shares' that vary by age, race, marital status, education, and urban status, and use these to analyze differences in inflation and welfare gains from trade for U.S. demographic groups over the years 1996'2018. We show that over this time period, import prices (inclusive of the effects of taste change) held down overall inflation for all groups. For the typical group, more than a quarter of the gains from trade relative to autarky accrued in our time period. Welfare gains from trade over our time period are largest for rural households, and smallest for Black households. Adding taste change to the typical welfare gains from trade formula boosts the gains for every group relative to the standard formula.
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Credit Access in the United States
July 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-45
We construct new population-level linked administrative data to study households' access to credit in the United States. These data reveal large differences in credit access by race, class, and hometown. By age 25, Black individuals, those who grew up in low-income families, and those who grew up in certain areas (including the Southeast and Appalachia) have significantly lower credit scores than other groups. Consistent with lower scores generating credit constraints, these individuals have smaller balances, more credit inquiries, higher credit card utilization rates, and greater use of alternative higher-cost forms of credit. Tests for alternative definitions of algorithmic bias in credit scores yield results in opposite directions. From a calibration perspective, group-level differences in credit scores understate differences in delinquency: conditional on a given credit score, Black individuals and those from low-income families fall delinquent at relatively higher rates. From a balance perspective, these groups receive lower credit scores even when comparing those with the same future repayment behavior. Addressing both of these biases and expanding credit access to groups with lower credit scores requires addressing group-level differences in delinquency rates. These delinquencies emerge soon after individuals access credit in their early twenties, often due to missed payments on credit cards, student loans, and other bills. Comprehensive measures of individuals' income profiles, income volatility, and observed wealth explain only a small portion of these repayment gaps. In contrast, we find that the large variation in repayment across hometowns mostly reflects the causal effect of childhood exposure to these places. Places that promote upward income mobility also promote repayment and expand credit access even conditional on income, suggesting that common place-level factors may drive behaviors in both credit and labor markets. We discuss suggestive evidence for several mechanisms that drive our results, including the role of social and cultural capital. We conclude that gaps in credit access by race, class, and hometown have roots in childhood environments.
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An Anatomy of U.S. Establishments' Trade Linkages in Global Value Chains
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-44
Global value chains (GVC) are a pervasive feature of modern production, but they are hard to measure. Using confidential microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we develop novel measures of the linkages between U.S. manufacturing establishments' imports and exports. We find that for every dollar of exports, imported inputs represent 13 cents in 2002 and 20 cents by 2017. Examining GVC trade flows in a gravity framework, we find that these flows are higher within 'round-trip' (input and output market is the same) linkages, regional trade agreements, and multinational firm boundaries. The strong complementarities between input and output markets are muted by the proportionality assumptions embedded in global input-output tables. Finally, with an off-the-shelf model, we show the round-trip results can be obtained when firm-specific sourcing and exporting fixed costs are linked.
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Aggregation Bias in the Measurement of U.S. Global Value Chains
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-49
This paper measures global value chain (GVC) activity, defined as imported content of exports, of U.S. manufacturing plants between 2002 and 2012. We assesses the extent of aggregation bias that arises from relying on industry-level exports, imports, and output to establish three results. First, GVC activity based on industry-level data underestimate the actual degree of GVC engagement by ignoring potential correlations between import and export activities across plants within industries. Second, the bias grew over the sample period. Finally, unlike with industry-level measures, we find little slowdown in GVC integration by U.S. manufacturers.
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The Impact of Immigration on Firms and Workers: Insights from the H-1B Lottery
April 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-19
We study how random variation in the availability of highly educated, foreign-born workers impacts firm performance and recruitment behavior. We combine two rich data sources: 1) administrative employer-employee matched data from the US Census Bureau; and 2) firm level information on the first large-scale H-1B visa lottery in 2007. Using an event-study approach, we find that lottery wins lead to increases in firm hiring of college-educated, immigrant labor along with increases in scale and survival. These effects are stronger for small, skill-intensive, and high-productivity firms that participate in the lottery. We do not find evidence for displacement of native-born, college-educated workers at the firm level, on net. However, this result masks dynamics among more specific subgroups of incumbents that we further elucidate.
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Who's Most Exposed to International Shocks? Estimating Differences in Import Price Sensitivity across U.S. Demographic Groups
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-13R
Differences in consumption patterns across demographic groups mean that international price shocks differentially affect such groups. We construct import price indexes for U.S. households that vary by age, race, marital status, education, and urban status. Black households and urban households experienced significantly higher import price inflation from 1996-2018 compared to other groups, such as white households and rural households. Sensitivity to international price shocks varies widely, implying movements in exchange rates and foreign prices, both during our sample and during the Covid-19 pandemic, drove sizable differences in import price inflation ' and total inflation ' across households.
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