Ron Jarmin (Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau), Shawn D. Klimek, Javier Miranda

Alternative Measures of Business Entry and Exit.

This paper explores the implications of alternative definitions of business units for computing statistics on business entry and exit, and job creation and destruction in the United States. The goal of the analysis is to point to ways to harmonize comparisons of business demographics across different sources and types of data and across countries.

Using the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) we compare measures of entry, exit, turnover and job creation and destruction across three alternative definitions of a business unit. The LBD is an establishment level dataset with firm (enterprise) ownership information, as well as detailed geographic, industry and establishment size information. This detailed information allows us to compute measures that are comparable to those obtained with data that are constrained to either establishment or enterprise units, or where enterprise data are available only for smaller geographic units such as individual countries within the European Union or states in the case of ES-202 based data in the U.S.

Our first task will be to compare establishment and enterprise level results for all industrial sectors in scope for the LBD. Next, we will use the geographic information in the LBD to characterize enterprise entry, and exit under two alternative definitions. The first defines the enterprise at the state level. The second defines the enterprise at the national level.

Session: 2a   Auditorium   Category: Innovative uses of business register data

Paper