IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cen/wpaper/21-33.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

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

Author

Listed:
  • Christopher Goetz
  • Martha Stinson

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher Goetz & Martha Stinson, 2021. "The Business Dynamics Statistics: Describing the Evolution of the U.S. Economy from 1978-2019," Working Papers 21-33, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    • Handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:21-33
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2021/CES-WP-21-33.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2021
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Nathan Goldschlag & Javier Miranda, 2020. "Business dynamics statistics of High Tech industries," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(1), pages 3-30, January.
    2. David Autor & David Dorn & Lawrence F Katz & Christina Patterson & John Van Reenen, 2020. "The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms [“Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor”]," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 135(2), pages 645-709.
    3. John Haltiwanger & Ron S. Jarmin & Javier Miranda, 2013. "Who Creates Jobs? Small versus Large versus Young," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(2), pages 347-361, May.
    4. Melissa Chow & Teresa C. Fort & Christopher Goetz & Nathan Goldschlag & James Lawrence & Elisabeth Ruth Perlman & Martha Stinson & T. Kirk White, 2021. "Redesigning the Longitudinal Business Database," Working Papers 21-08, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Melissa Chow & Martha Stinson, 2025. "Business Dynamics Statistics of Coastal Counties: A Description of Differences in Coastal Areas Over Time," Working Papers 25-08, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.

    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. Joonkyu Choi & Nathan Goldschlag & John C. Haltiwanger & J. Daniel Kim, 2021. "Early Joiners and Startup Performance," NBER Working Papers 28417, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Kyle Handley & Fariha Kamal & Wei Ouyang, 2021. "A Long View of Employment Growth and Firm Dynamics in the United States: Importers vs. Exporters vs. Non-Traders," Working Papers 21-38, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    3. Steven Bond‐Smith, 2022. "Discretely innovating: The effect of limited market contestability on innovation and growth," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 69(3), pages 301-327, July.
    4. Kim, Seula, 2025. "Workers' Job Prospects and Young Firm Dynamics," IZA Discussion Papers 17655, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Alon, Titan & Berger, David & Dent, Robert & Pugsley, Benjamin, 2018. "Older and slower: The startup deficit’s lasting effects on aggregate productivity growth," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 68-85.
    6. Ziran Ding & Jose Garcia‐Louzao & Valentin Jouvanceau, 2025. "The dynamics of product and labour market power: Evidence from Lithuania," Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 33(1), pages 165-194, January.
    7. Jiayi Bao, 2022. "Social safety nets and new venture performance: The role of employee access to paid family leave benefits," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(12), pages 2545-2576, December.
    8. Xiang Ding & Teresa C. Fort & Stephen J. Redding & Peter K. Schott, 2019. "Structural Change Within Versus Across Firms: Evidence from the United States," Working Papers 2019-9, Princeton University. Economics Department..
    9. Akcigit, Ufuk & Akgunduz, Yusuf Emre & Cilasun, Seyit Mumin & Ozcan-Tok, Elif & Yilmaz, Fatih, 2020. "Facts on business dynamism in Turkey," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 128(C).
    10. Akcigit, Ufuk & Chhina, Raman & Cilasun, Seyit Mümin & Miranda, Javier & Ocakverdi, Eren & Serrano-Velarde, Nicolas, 2023. "Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Index: A new employment series for the US, Canada, and the UK," IWH Discussion Papers 9/2023, Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).
    11. Chen Yeh & Claudia Macaluso & Brad Hershbein, 2022. "Monopsony in the US Labor Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 112(7), pages 2099-2138, July.
    12. Pekkala Kerr, Sari & Kerr, William, 2020. "Immigrant entrepreneurship in America: Evidence from the survey of business owners 2007 & 2012," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 49(3).
    13. Gert Bijnens & Jozef Konings, 2020. "Declining business dynamism in Belgium," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 54(4), pages 1201-1239, April.
    14. Drautzburg, Thorsten, 2019. "Entrepreneurial tail risk: Implications for employment dynamics," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 85-100.
    15. Melissa Chow & Teresa C. Fort & Christopher Goetz & Nathan Goldschlag & James Lawrence & Elisabeth Ruth Perlman & Martha Stinson & T. Kirk White, 2021. "Redesigning the Longitudinal Business Database," Working Papers 21-08, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    16. Daan Freeman & Leon Bettendorf & Harro van Heuvelen & Gerdien Meijerink, 2021. "The contribution of business dynamics to productivity growth in the Netherlands," CPB Discussion Paper 427, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    17. Marcela Eslava & John Haltiwanger & Alvaro PinzÔøΩn, 2019. "Job creation in Colombia vs the U.S.: "up or out dynamics" meets "the life cycle of plants"," Documentos CEDE 17174, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.
    18. Babina, Tania & Barkai, Simcha & Jeffers, Jessica & Karger, Ezra & Volkova, Ekaterina, 2023. "Antitrust Enforcement Increases Economic Activity," HEC Research Papers Series 1488, HEC Paris.
    19. Nieto-Carrillo, Ernesto & Carreira, Carlos & Teixeira, Paulino, 2024. "Industrial dynamics in the ICT technological paradigm: The case of Portugal, 1986–2018," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 155-170.
    20. Gert Bijnens & Joep Konings, 2018. "Declining Business Dynamism," Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven 614199, KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven.

    More about this item

    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:cen:wpaper:21-33. 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: Dawn Anderson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesgvus.html .

    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.