Alfred Nucci (Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau), Richard Boden

Demography of Nonemployer Businesses -- Preliminary Evidence from the United States

Research on business demography has been conducted for the most part on populations of businesses with employees. While this work has contributed much to our understanding of firm entry, survival and closing, it remains a partial description of business populations, albeit one covering the vast bulk of economic activity. A substantial number of businesses without employees remains outside the scope of these studies. The dynamics of these firms is not well known and their role in the dynamics of employee businesses remains illusive.

This paper studies the population dynamics of "firms" without employees but with positive receipts (i.e. nonemployer firms) for the United States during the 1990's. In doing so, we draw upon information available from US Census Bureau's nonemployer firm files for the 1990's. We have two goals in this work. One is the identification of firms as entrants, survivors or closures during the 1990's. We discuss procedures for combining these data, at the firm level, from the individual year's files in constructing a longitudinal database of nonemployer firms.

The second is the identification of nonemployer units that become employer ones during this period. To do so, nonemployer firm files are combined with registers of firms with employess in isolating those nonemployer units that become employer units, showing that many units move between the populations during the 1990's. Further, we rely upon work conducted at US Census Bureau's Center for Economic Studies (its Longitudinal Business Database program) in outlining how the nonemployer and employer firm populations may be combined in an economy-wide firm database.

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

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