Small business and job creation: Dissecting the myth and reassessing the facts

This paper investigates how job creation and destruction behavior varies by employer size in the U.S. manufacturing sector during the period 1972 to 1988. The paper also evaluates the empirical basis for conventional claims about the job-creating prowess of small businesses. The chief findings and conclusions fall into five categories:

A decomposition of the Harberger expression for tax incidence

In this paper we propose a decomposition of the Harberger expression for the incidence of the corporate income tax into ‘commodity price distortion’ and ‘factor price distortion’ effects. By applying Harberger's estimates of the parameters for the U.S. economy, we will demonstrate that the factor price distortion effect, which has an extremely simple formal expression, explains 115 percent of the total effect of the tax change on the rate of return. This suggests that the commodity price distortion effect may be relatively unimportant in explaining the tax incidence. The difference between our two effects and Mieszkowski's (1967) output and factor substitution effects is also noted.     

Worker flows, job flows and firm wage policies

Like many transition economies, Slovenia is undergoing profound changes in the workings of the labour market with potentially greater flexibility in terms of both wage and employment adjustment. To investigate the impact of these changes, we use unique longitudinal matched employer‐employee data that permits measurement of employment transitions and wages for workers and enables links of the workers to the firms in which they are employed. We can thus measure worker flows and job flows in a comprehensive and integrated manner. We find a high pace of job flows in Slovenia especially for young, small, private and foreign‐owned firms and for young, less educated workers. While job flows have approached the rates observed in developed market economies, the excess of worker flows above job flows is lower than that observed in market economies. A key factor in the patterns of the worker and job flows is the determination of wages in Slovenia. A base wage schedule provides strict guidelines for minimum wages for different skill categories. However, firms are permitted to offer higher wages to an individual based upon the success of the worker and/or the firm. Our analysis shows that firms deviate from the base wage schedule significantly and that the idiosyncratic wage policies of firms are closely related to the observed pattern of worker and job flows at the firm. Firms with more flexible wages (measured as less compression of wages within the firm) have less employment instability and are also able to improve the match quality of their workers. JEL Classifications: J23, J31, J41, J61, P23, P31.     

Trade and market selection: Evidence from manufacturing plants in Colombia

We examine the link between trade liberalization and aggregate productivity, with a focus on improved market selection resulting from a reduction in trade barriers and in the dispersion of these barriers across producers. Our analysis exploits tariff changes across sectors after the Colombian trade reform. An additional advantage of our analysis is that our TFP measure does not include demand and price effects. We find that reduced trade protection makes plant survival depend more closely on productivity. Using a dynamic simulation, we find that enhanced selection increases aggregate productivity substantially. Trade liberalization also increases productivity of incumbent plants and improves the allocation of activity. We find larger effects on allocative efficiency with our TFP measure than with a traditional measure including price effects.     

Downsizing and productivity growth: Myth or reality?

The conventional wisdom is that the rising productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector in the 1980s has been driven by the apparently pervasive downsizing over this period. Aggregate evidence clearly shows falling employment accompanying the rise in productivity. In this paper, we examine the microeconomic evidence using the plant level data from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD). In contrast to the conventional wisdom, we find that plants that increased employment as well as productivity contribute almost as much to overall productivity growth in the 1980s as the plants that increased productivity at the expense of employment. Further, there are striking differences by sector (defined by industry, size, region, wages, and ownership type) in the allocation of plants in terms of whether they upsize or downsize and whether they increase or decrease productivity. Nevertheless, in spite of the striking differences across sectors defined in a variety of ways, most of the variance of productivity and employment growth is accounted for by idiosyncratic factors.     

Labor market flows in the cross section and over time

Many theoretical models of labor market search imply a tight link between worker flows (hires and separations) and job gains and losses at the employer level. We use rich establishment-level data to assess several theoretical models and to study the relationship between worker flows and jobs flows. Hires, quits, and layoffs exhibit strong, highly nonlinear relationships to employer growth rates in the cross section. Simple statistical models of these relationships greatly improve our ability to account for fluctuations in aggregate worker flows and enable us to construct synthetic measures of hires, separations, quits, and layoffs back to 1990.     

High-frequency data from the U.S. Census Bureau during the COVID-19 pandemic: small vs. new businesses

Business Economics - Small businesses experienced very sharp declines in activity, business sentiment, and expectations early in the pandemic. While there has been some recovery since then,...     

Cross-Country Evidence on Public Sector Retrenchment

This article reports the results from a survey of public sectoremployment retrench-ment episodes across a wide variety of developingand transition economies. The information collected and analyzedis primarily from internal World Bank documents and in-depthinterviews with World Bank staff having operational informationabout experiences in specific countries. Using the informationcollected on 41 retrenchment programs across 37 countries, thearticle analyzes the relationships between the factors leadingto retrenchment, the scope and nature of retrenchment, and themethods used to accomplish the retrenchment. The discussionof methods includes an analysis of the mix of involuntary andvoluntary employment reduction programs, the compensation schemesoffered, and the extent of targeting of specific types of workers.Although relevant quantitative information is limited, the articlealso attempts to evaluate the outcome of the programs on severaldimensions. The most striking findings relate to analysis ofthe factors leading a significant fraction of programs to rehireworkers separated from the public sector (thereby defeatingthe programs'objective). In addition, the article relates programcharacteristics to calculated summary financial payback indicatorsand to the nature of the labor market adjustment.     

Dispersion in Dispersion: Measuring Establishment-Level Differences in Productivity

We describe new experimental productivity dispersion statistics, Dispersion Statistics on Productivity (DiSP), jointly produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau, that complement the official BLS industry-level productivity statistics. The BLS has a long history of producing industry-level productivity statistics, which represent the average establishment-level productivity within industries when appropriately weighted. These statistics cannot, however, tell us about the variation in productivity levels across establishments within those industries. Dispersion in productivity across businesses can provide information about the nature of competition and frictions within sectors and the sources of rising wage inequality across businesses. DiSP data show enormous differences in productivity across establishments within industries in the manufacturing sector. We find substantial variation in dispersion across industries, increasing dispersion from 1997 to 2016, and countercyclical total factor productivity dispersion. We hope DiSP will enable further research into understanding productivity differences across industries and establishments and over time.