CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Census Bureau Business Dynamics Statistics'

The following papers contain search terms that you selected. From the papers listed below, you can navigate to the PDF, the profile page for that working paper, or see all the working papers written by an author. You can also explore tags, keywords, and authors that occur frequently within these papers.
Click here to search again

Frequently Occurring Concepts within this Search

Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 16


  • Working Paper

    Tracking Firm Use of AI in Real Time: A Snapshot from the Business Trends and Outlook Survey

    March 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-16R

    Timely and accurate measurement of AI use by firms is both challenging and crucial for understanding the impacts of AI on the U.S. economy. We provide new, real-time estimates of current and expected future use of AI for business purposes based on the Business Trends and Outlook Survey for September 2023 to February 2024. During this period, bi-weekly estimates of AI use rate rose from 3.7% to 5.4%, with an expected rate of about 6.6% by early Fall 2024. The fraction of workers at businesses that use AI is higher, especially for large businesses and in the Information sector. AI use is higher in large firms but the relationship between AI use and firm size is non-monotonic. In contrast, AI use is higher in young firms. Common uses of AI include marketing automation, virtual agents, and data/text analytics. AI users often utilize AI to substitute for worker tasks and equipment/software, but few report reductions in employment due to AI use. Many firms undergo organizational changes to accommodate AI, particularly by training staff, developing new workflows, and purchasing cloud services/storage. AI users also exhibit better overall performance and higher incidence of employment expansion compared to other businesses. The most common reason for non-adoption is the inapplicability of AI to the business.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    AI Adoption in America: Who, What, and Where

    September 2023

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-23-48R

    We study the early adoption and diffusion of five AI-related technologies (automated-guided vehicles, machine learning, machine vision, natural language processing, and voice recognition) as documented in the 2018 Annual Business Survey of 850,000 firms across the United States. We find that fewer than 6% of firms used any of the AI-related technologies we measure, though most very large firms reported at least some AI use. Weighted by employment, average adoption was just over 18%. AI use in production, while varying considerably by industry, nevertheless was found in every sector of the economy and clustered with emerging technologies such as cloud computing and robotics. Among dynamic young firms, AI use was highest alongside more educated, more-experienced, and younger owners, including owners motivated by bringing new ideas to market or helping the community. AI adoption was also more common alongside indicators of high-growth entrepreneurship, including venture capital funding, recent product and process innovation, and growth-oriented business strategies. Early adoption was far from evenly distributed: a handful of 'superstar' cities and emerging hubs led startups' adoption of AI. These patterns of early AI use foreshadow economic and social impacts far beyond this limited initial diffusion, with the possibility of a growing 'AI divide' if early patterns persist.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Where Have All the "Creative Talents" Gone? Employment Dynamics of US Inventors

    April 2023

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-23-17

    How are inventors allocated in the US economy and does that allocation affect innovative capacity? To answer these questions, we first build a model where an inventor with a new idea has the possibility to work for an entrant or incumbent firm. Strategic considerations encourage the incumbent to hire the inventor, offering higher wages, and then not implement her idea. We then combine data on 760 thousand U.S. inventors with the LEHD data. We find that when an inventor is hired by an incumbent, their earnings increases by 12.6 percent and their innovative output declines by 6 to 11 percent.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    The Business Dynamics Statistics: Describing the Evolution of the U.S. Economy from 1978-2019

    October 2021

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-21-33

    The U.S. Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) provide annual measures of how many businesses begin, end, or continue their operations and the associated job creation and destruction. The BDS is a valuable resource for information on the U.S. economy because of its long time series (1978-2019), its complete coverage (all private sector, non-farm U.S. businesses), and its tabulations for both individual establishments and the firms that own and control them. In this paper, we use the publicly available BDS data to describe the dynamics of the economy over the past 40 years. We highlight the increasing concentration of employment at old and large firms and describe net job creation trends in the manufacturing, retail, information, food/accommodations, and healthcare industry sectors. We show how the spatial distribution of employment has changed, first moving away from the largest cities and then back again. Finally, we show long-run trends for a group of industries we classify as high-tech and explore how the share of employment at small and young firms has changed for this part of the economy.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Entrepreneurial Teams: Diversity of Skills and Early-Stage Growth

    December 2020

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-20-45

    We use employer-employee linked data to track the employment histories of team members prior to startup formation for a full cohort of new firms in the U.S. Using pre-startup industry experience to measure skillsets, we find that startups that have founding teams with more diverse collective skillsets grow faster than peer firms in the same industries and local economies. A one standard deviation increase in teams' skill diversity is associated with an increase in five-year employment (sales) growth of 16% (10%) from the mean. The effects are stronger among startups in innovative industries and among startups facing greater ex-ante uncertainty. Moreover, the results are robust to a variety of approaches to address the endogeneity of team composition. Overall, our results suggest that teams with more diverse collective skillsets adapt their strategies more successfully in the uncertain environments faced by (innovative) startup firms.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Older and Slower: The Startup Deficit's Lasting Effects on Aggregate Productivity Growth

    June 2018

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-18-29

    We investigate the link between declining firm entry, aging incumbent firms and sluggish U.S. productivity growth. We provide a dynamic decomposition framework to characterize the contributions to industry productivity growth across the firm age distribution and apply this framework to the newly developed Revenue-enhanced Longitudinal Business Database (ReLBD). Overall, several key findings emerge: (i) the relationship between firm age and productivity growth is downward sloping and convex; (ii) the magnitudes are substantial and significant but fade quickly, with nearly 2/3 of the effect disappearing after five years and nearly the entire effect disappearing after ten; (iii) the higher productivity growth of young firms is driven nearly exclusively by the forces of selection and reallocation. Our results suggest a cumulative drag on aggregate productivity of 3.1% since 1980. Using an instrumental variables strategy we find a consistent pattern across states/MSAs in the U.S. The patterns are broadly consistent with a standard model of firm dynamics with monopolistic competition.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    The Role of Start-Ups in StructuralTransformation

    January 2016

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-16-38

    The U.S. economy has been going through a striking structural transformation'the secular reallocation of employment across sectors'over the past several decades. We propose a decomposition framework to assess the contributions of various margins of firm dynamics to this shift. Using firm-level data, we find that at least 50 percent of the adjustment has been taking place along the entry margin, owing to sectors receiving shares of start-up employment that differ from their overall employment shares. The rest is mostly the result of life cycle differences across sectors. Declining overall entry has a small but growing effect of dampening structural transformation.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    The Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs: An Introduction

    November 2015

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-15-40R

    The Census Bureau continually seeks to improve its measures of the U.S. economy as part of its mission. In some cases this means expanding or updating the content of its existing surveys, expanding the use of administrative data, and/or exploring the use of privately collected data. When these options cannot provide the needed data, the Census Bureau may consider fielding a new survey to fill the gap. This paper describes one such new survey, the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs (ASE). Innovations in content, format, and process are designed to provide high-quality, timely, frequent information on the activities of one of the important drivers of economic growth: entrepreneurship. The ASE is collected through a partnership of the Census Bureau with the Kauffman Foundation and the Minority Business Development Agency. The first wave of the ASE collection started in fall of 2015 (for reference period 2014) and results will be released in summer 2016. Qualified researchers on approved projects will be able to access micro data from the ASE through the Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC) network.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Grown-Up Business Cycles

    October 2015

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-15-33

    We document two striking facts about U.S. firm dynamics and interpret their significance for employment dynamics. The first is the dramatic decline in firm entry and the second is the gradual shift of employment toward older firms since 1980. We show that despite these trends, the lifecycle dynamics of firms and their business cycle properties have remained virtually unchanged. Consequently, aging is the delayed effect of accumulating startup deficits. Together, the decline in the employment contribution of startups and the shift of employment toward more mature firms contributed to the emergence of jobless recoveries in the U.S. economy.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    The Promise and Potential of Linked Employer-Employee Data for Entrepreneurship Research

    September 2015

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-15-29

    In this paper, we highlight the potential for linked employer-employee data to be used in entrepreneurship research, describing new data on business start-ups, their founders and early employees, and providing examples of how they can be used in entrepreneurship research. Linked employer-employee data provides a unique perspective on new business creation by combining information on the business, workforce, and individual. By combining data on both workers and firms, linked data can investigate many questions that owner-level or firm-level data cannot easily answer alone - such as composition of the workforce at start-ups and their role in explaining business dynamics, the flow of workers across new and established firms, and the employment paths of the business owners themselves.
    View Full Paper PDF