IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/smo/cpaper/9js.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Emerging the U.S. Firm Size Distribution Using 4.2 Billion Individual Tax Records

Author

Listed:
  • Joseph A.E. Shaheen

    (George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA)

Abstract

The firm size distribution describes important economic and labor properties of any economy. Government entities must expend enormous resources in data collection, cleaning, and analysis in order to construct this and other important distributions describing the aggregate properties large economies. In the U.S., this process can be cumbersome and relies on querying multiple databases and utilizing significant computational resources. I show that construction of the U.S. firm size distribution is plausible using only individual income tax records (W2s) drawn directly from Internal Revenue Service tax records (micro data) and that the emergent distribution is statistically identical to what is reported by the United States Census Bureau. The methodology represents an incremental advance for population-scale studies in economic analysis—specifically firm and labor analysis. Finally, this paper acts as a re-validation of earlier work in fitting the firm size distribution.

Suggested Citation

  • Joseph A.E. Shaheen, 2019. "Emerging the U.S. Firm Size Distribution Using 4.2 Billion Individual Tax Records," Proceedings of the 12th International RAIS Conference, April 3-4, 2019 9JS, Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:smo:cpaper:9js
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://rais.education/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/9JS.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Evans, David S, 1987. "The Relationship between Firm Growth, Size, and Age: Estimates for 100 Manufacturing Industries," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(4), pages 567-581, June.
    2. Reed, William J., 2001. "The Pareto, Zipf and other power laws," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 74(1), pages 15-19, December.
    3. Sutton, John, 2002. "The variance of firm growth rates: the ‘scaling’ puzzle," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 312(3), pages 577-590.
    4. Evans, David S, 1987. "Tests of Alternative Theories of Firm Growth," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 95(4), pages 657-674, August.
    5. Luís M B Cabral & José Mata, 2003. "On the Evolution of the Firm Size Distribution: Facts and Theory," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(4), pages 1075-1090, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Costas Arkolakis, 2016. "A Unified Theory of Firm Selection and Growth," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 131(1), pages 89-155.
    2. Sakai, Koji & Uesugi, Iichiro & Watanabe, Tsutomu, 2010. "Firm age and the evolution of borrowing costs: Evidence from Japanese small firms," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(8), pages 1970-1981, August.
    3. Coad, Alex & Segarra, Agustí & Teruel, Mercedes, 2013. "Like milk or wine: Does firm performance improve with age?," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 24(C), pages 173-189.
    4. Geurts, Karen & Van Biesebroeck, Johannes, 2016. "Firm creation and post-entry dynamics of de novo entrants," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 59-104.
    5. de Wit, Gerrit, 2005. "Firm size distributions: An overview of steady-state distributions resulting from firm dynamics models," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 23(5-6), pages 423-450, June.
    6. Farasat A. S. Bokhari & Franco Mariuzzo & Anna Rita Bennato, 2021. "Innovation and growth in the UK pharmaceuticals: the case of product and marketing introductions," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 57(1), pages 603-634, June.
    7. Distante, Roberta & Petrella, Ivan & Santoro, Emiliano, 2018. "Gibrat’s law and quantile regressions: An application to firm growth," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 5-9.
    8. Cefis, Elena & Ciccarelli, Matteo & Orsenigo, Luigi, 2007. "Testing Gibrat's legacy: A Bayesian approach to study the growth of firms," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 18(3), pages 348-369, September.
    9. Bartelsman, Eric & Haltiwanger, John C. & Scarpetta, Stefano, 2004. "Microeconomic Evidence of Creative Destruction in Industrial and Developing Countries," IZA Discussion Papers 1374, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    10. D.B. Audretsch & L. Klomp & E. Santarelli & A.R. Thurik, 2004. "Gibrat's Law: Are the Services Different?," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 24(3), pages 301-324, May.
    11. Michael Pfaffermayr, 2007. "Firm Growth Under Sample Selection: Conditional σ-Convergence in Firm Size?," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 31(4), pages 303-328, December.
    12. Jaana Lappalainen & Mervi Niskanen, 2009. "Does Board Composition and Ownership Structure Affect Firm Growth? Evidence from Finnish SMEs," Research in Economics and Business: Central and Eastern Europe, Tallinn School of Economics and Business Administration, Tallinn University of Technology, vol. 1(1).
    13. Jakub Growiec & Fabio Pammolli & Massimo Riccaboni, 2020. "Innovation and Corporate Dynamics: A Theoretical Framework," Central European Journal of Economic Modelling and Econometrics, Central European Journal of Economic Modelling and Econometrics, vol. 12(1), pages 1-45, March.
    14. Rui Baptista & Roy Thurik, 2004. "The Relationship between Entrepreneurship and Unemployment: is Portugal an Outlier?," Papers on Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy 2004-40, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy Group.
    15. Ferrando, Annalisa & Martinez-Carrascal, Carmen & Coluzzi, Chiara, 2009. "Financing obstacles and growth: an analysis for euro area non-financial corporations," Working Paper Series 997, European Central Bank.
    16. Esteban Rossi-Hansberg & Mark L. J. Wright, 2007. "Establishment Size Dynamics in the Aggregate Economy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(5), pages 1639-1666, December.
    17. Şeker, Murat, 2012. "A structural model of firm and industry evolution: Evidence from Chile," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 36(6), pages 891-913.
    18. Huynh, Kim P. & Petrunia, Robert J., 2010. "Age effects, leverage and firm growth," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 34(5), pages 1003-1013, May.
    19. Peter Huber & Harald Oberhofer & Michael Pfaffermayr, 2014. "Job creation and the intra-distribution dynamics of the firm size distribution," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 23(1), pages 171-197, February.
    20. Müller, Bettina, 2009. "Ability matching and survival of start-ups," ZEW Discussion Papers 09-041, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    firm size; labor; taxation; data policy; economic analysis; data science;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:smo:cpaper:9js. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Eduard David (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://rais.education/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.