Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Securities and Exchange Commission'
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Authors
Lucia Foster - 3
Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 34
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Working PaperEstablishment-Level Life Cycle and Analysts' Forecasts
February 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-12
This paper examines how multi-unit firms' life-cycle stages affect analyst forecast accuracy. While prior studies focus on the firm-level life cycle, we utilize the Census data and focus on the establishment level. We find that analyst forecast accuracy is lower for multi-unit firms whose establishments are in different life-cycle stages than those in the same life-cycle stage. This finding suggests that the forecasting difficulty of more diversified firms can be attributed to the different life-cycle stages of each establishment. We also find that for firms whose units are in different stages, analyst forecast accuracy is lower if the establishments in earlier stages are larger (i.e., generate more revenue) than those in later stages. As a comparison, we estimate the life-cycle stages using firms' segment classifications in their 10-K filings. We find that analysts' forecast accuracy is lower when firms report fewer segments than the number of establishments, suggesting that aggregating more establishments for segment reporting could complicate analysts' forecasting. To our knowledge, this is the first study that focuses on the establishment-level life cycle. This study highlights that firm-level life cycles should not be taken without caution, as aggregating multiple units' life cycles may be misleading. In order to provide better forecasts to investors, analysts should have a deeper understanding of firms' subunits, especially when the establishments are in different life-cycle stages.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperMeasurement Matters: Financial Reporting and Productivity
December 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-72
We examine how differences in financial reporting practices shape firm productivity. Leveraging new audit questions in the U.S. Census Bureau's 2021 Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS), and complementary tax return data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and detailed financial records from Sageworks, we find that (i) variation in reporting quality explains 10-20 percent of intra-industry total factor productivity dispersion, and (ii) evidence of complementarity between the effects of financial audits and management practices driving firm productivity. We then examine the underlying mechanisms. First, audits function as a managerial technology, improving the precision of internal information and raising efficiency, with stronger effects in competitive, low-margin industries and among younger firms. Second, exploiting cross-state variation in tax incentives, we show that audits constrain underreporting and mitigate the downward bias in measured productivity. Together, these results highlight the underrated importance of financial reporting quality driving firm productivity.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperMatching Compustat Data to the Longitudinal Business Database, 1976-2020
September 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-65
This paper details the methodology for creating an updated Compustat-Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) bridge, facilitating linkage between company identifiers in Compustat and firm identifiers in the LBD. In addition to data from Compustat, we incorporate historical data on public companies from various public and private sources, including information on executive names. Our methodology involves a series of stages using fuzzy name and address matching, including EIN, telephone number, and industry code matching. Qualified researchers with approved proposals can access this bridge though the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers. The Compustat-SSL bridge serves as a crucial resource for longitudinal studies on U.S. businesses, corporate governance, and executive compensation.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperCorporate Share Repurchase Policies and Labor Share
February 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-14
Using census data, we investigate whether share repurchases are responsible for the fall in labor share in U.S. corporations. Recent legislation imposes taxes on share repurchases, motivated by the assertion that share repurchases have led to reduced labor payments. Using several empirical approaches, we find no evidence that increases in share repurchases contribute to decreases in labor share. Top share repurchasing firms since 1982 did not decrease labor share. We also rely on exogenous changes in share repurchases around EPS announcements to pinpoint causality. Policies aimed at improving labor share by discouraging share repurchases will likely not achieve their objectives.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
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Working PaperAccess to Financing and Racial Pay Gap Inside Firms
July 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-36
How does access to financing influence racial pay inequality inside firms? We answer this question using the employer-employee matched data administered by the U.S. Census Bureau and detailed resume data recording workers' career trajectories. Exploiting exogenous shocks to firms' debt capacity, we find that better access to debt financing significantly narrows the earnings gap between minority and white workers. Minority workers experience a persistent increase in earnings and also a rise in the pay rank relative to white workers in the same firm. The effect is more pronounced among mid- and high-skill minority workers, in areas where white workers are in shorter supply, and for firms with ex-ante less diverse boards and greater pre-existing racial inequality. With better access to financing, minority workers are also more likely to be promoted or be reassigned to technology-oriented occupations compared to white workers. Our evidence is consistent with access to financing making firms better utilize minority workers' human capital.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperInvestment 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.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperMultinational Firms in the U.S. Economy: Insights from Newly Integrated Microdata
September 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-39
This paper describes the construction of two confidential crosswalk files enabling a comprehensive identification of multinational rms in the U.S. economy. The effort combines firm-level surveys on direct investment conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Register (BR) spanning the universe of employer businesses from 1997 to 2017. First, the parent crosswalk links BEA firm-level surveys on U.S. direct investment abroad and the BR. Second, the affiliate crosswalk links BEA firm-level surveys on foreign direct investment in the United States and the BR. Using these newly available links, we distinguish between U.S.- and foreign-owned multinational firms and describe their prevalence and economic activities in the national economy, by sector, and by geography.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperShareholder Power and the Decline of Labor
May 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-17
Shareholder power in the US grew over recent decades due to a steep rise in concentrated institutional ownership. Using establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database for 1982-2015, this paper examines the impact of increases in concentrated institutional ownership on employment, wages, shareholder returns, and labor productivity. Consistent with theory of the firm based on conflicts of interests between shareholders and stakeholders, we find that establishments of firms that experience an increase in ownership by larger and more concentrated institutional shareholders have lower employment and wages. This result holds in both panel regressions with establishment fixed effects and a difference-in-differences design that exploits large increases in concentrated institutional ownership, and is robust to controls for industry and local shocks. The result is more pronounced in industries where labor is relatively less unionized, in more monopsonistic local labor markets, and for dedicated and activist institutional shareholders. The labor losses are accompanied by higher shareholder returns but no improvements in labor productivity, suggesting that shareholder power mainly reallocates rents away from workers. Our results imply that the rise in concentrated institutional ownership could explain about a quarter of the secular decline in the aggregate labor share.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Evolution of U.S. Retail Concentration
March 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-07
Increases in national concentration have been a salient feature of industry dynamics in the U.S. and have contributed to concerns about increasing market power. Yet, local trends may be more informative about market power, particularly in the retail sector where consumers have traditionally shopped at nearby stores. We find that local concentration has increased almost in parallel with national concentration using novel Census data on product-level revenue for all U.S. retail stores. The increases in concentration are broad based, affecting most markets, products, and retail industries. We implement a new decomposition of the national Herfindahl Hirschman Index and show that despite similar trends, national and local concentration reflect different changes in the retail sector. The increase in national concentration comes from consumers in different markets increasingly buying from the same firms and does not reflect changes in local market power. We estimate a model of retail competition which links local concentration to markups. The model implies that the increase in local concentration explains one-third of the observed increase in markups.View Full Paper PDF
