Hi all, please spread the word and we hope everyone can make good use of this new data drop: cmfdata.org
The full surviving establishment-level Census of Manufactures manuscripts and digitized data from 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880!
Congratulations to Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt and Joel Mokyr for a well deserved Nobel Prize. It was nice to see the US Census Bureau's Business Dynamic Statistics featured in the motivating evidence in the scientific writeup: www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2025...
this chart is a nice encapsulation of the economic trajectory over the past 2 weeks... Expectations less awful, but present reality getting slightly worse.
The Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) underpins many studies of firm-level behavior. It tracks longitudinally all employers in the nonfarm private sector but lacks information about business financing and owner characteristics. We address this shortcoming by linking LBD observations to firm-level data drawn from several large Census Bureau surveys. The resulting Longitudinal Employer, Owner, and Financing (LEOF) database contains more than 3 million observations at the firm-year level with information about start-up financing, current financing, owner demographics, ownership structure, profitability, and owner aspirations – all linked to annual firm-level employment data since the firm hired its first employee. Using the LEOF database, we document trends in owner demographics and financing patterns and investigate how these business characteristics relate to firm-level employment outcomes.
A line chart titled "Figure 1. Distribution of Firm Four-Year Growth Rates, 2002 to 2018 (Employment Weighted)." The x-axis represents the percentile of employment growth (ranging from 0 to 99), while the y-axis shows the average annual percent employment change (ranging from -200% to 200%).
📈📉New Census Working Paper: "Financing, Ownership, and Performance: A Novel, Longitudinal Firm-Level Database" by J. David Brown, Steven J. Davis, Lucia Foster (@lucia-econ.bsky.social), John Haltiwanger (@jchaltiwangerum.bsky.social), and John Sabelhaus www.census.gov/library/work...
I’ve seen some folks on here sharing the Census Bureau business application data.
One thought for anybody looking at this data - it’s probably worth focusing on the “high-propensity” segment - ie high propensity to become a business with payroll.
Ryan Decker and I have studied the surge in new business applications finding that it has led to a surge in new employer businesses. See:
www.brookings.edu/articles/sur...
NAS Report on AI and the Future of Work Released today:
www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/aut...
The US Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey shows that AI adoption by US firms has risen to 6% the highest on record. (Data goes back to late 2023.)
Additionally, the share of firms *planning* to use AI has risen north of 9%.
Could you add me? Thank you!
The international empirics of management | Read the latest article by Nick Bloom, Renata Lemos, @raffasadun.bsky.social , @danielascur.bsky.social and @johnvanreenen.bsky.social for PNAS
poid.lse.ac.uk/PUBLI...
New Economic and Social Science Research Published in the CES Working Paper Series 🧵 content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USC...
I made a starter pack of government economists.
go.bsky.app/K7fAcMi
New paper "Early Career Paths of Economists Inside and Outside of Academia" in Journal of Economic Perspectives with Danielle Sandler and @erikamcentarfer.bsky.social in pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...
Foster, Lucia, Erika McEntarfer, and Danielle H. Sandler in the Journal of Economic Perspectives: "Early Career Paths of Economists inside and outside of Academia"
www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
