The Economic Census is one of the most important activities that the U.S. Census Bureau performs. It is critical for updating firm ownership/structure and industry information for a large number of businesses in the Census Bureau’s Business Register, impacting most other economic programs....

The growth and dominance of large, national chains is a ubiquitous feature of the US retail sector. The recent literature has documented the rise of these chains and the contribution of this structural change to productivity growth in the retail trade sector. Recent studies have also shown that...

The high pace of reallocation across producers is pervasive in the U.S. economy. Evidence shows this high pace of reallocation is closely linked to productivity. While these patterns hold on average, the extent to which the reallocation dynamics in recessions are "cleansing" is an open question....

There is considerable evidence that producer-level churning contributes substantially to aggregate (industry) productivity growth, as more productive businesses displace less productive ones. However, this research has been limited by the fact that producer-level prices are typically unobserved;...

By exploiting establishment-level data, this paper sheds new light on the source of the changes in the structure of production, wages, and employment that have occurred over the last several decades. Based on theoretical work by Caselli (1999) and Kremer and Maskin (1996), we focus on...

In this paper, we exploit establishment-level data to examine the relationship between microeconomic productivity dynamics and aggregate productivity growth. After synthesizing the evidence from recent studies, we conduct our own analysis using establishment-level data for U.S. manufacturing...

Understanding the nature and magnitude of resource reallocation, particularly as it relates to productivity growth, is important both because it affects how we model and interpret aggregate productivity dynamics, and also because market structure and institutions may affect the reallocation's...

It is well known that new businesses are typically much smaller than their established industry competitors, and that this size gap closes slowly. We show that even in commodity-like product markets, these patterns do not reflect productivity gaps, but rather differences in demand-side...

We examine the relationship between investments in information technology (IT) and retail firm performance. We use untapped firm and establishment micro data from the Censuses of Retail Trade and the Assets and Expenditures Survey. We show that large firms account for most retail IT investment,...