We study the variability of business growth rates in the U.S. private sector from 1976 onwards. To carry out our study, we exploit the recently developed Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), which contains annual observations on employment and payroll for all U.S. businesses. Our central...

We develop a framework that uses price and quantity information on both firms' outputs and inputs to assess the roles, on firm dynamics and welfare, of efficiency, input prices, demand/quality, idiosyncratic markups, and residual wedges. Our strategy nests previous approaches limited by data...

Countries differ substantially in the extent to which more productive firms are large and/or are becoming larger and less productive firms are small and/or becoming smaller. A challenge for both emerging and advanced economies is that achieving such static and dynamic allocative efficiency...

This paper provides a synthesis of what is known about the determinants of output growth based on studying microeconomic data sets. It starts with a summary of the theoretical explanations which help reconcile heterogeneous performance observed across establishments in the same sector. The...

Newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS), allow unprecedented tracking of business dynamics for U.S. firms and establishments. This is the fourth in a series of briefings to highlight some key features of the data. What is the role of young...

This analysis attempts to place existing research about job growth among young, small firms in the context of productivity dynamics. Most research to date has relied on U.S. manufacturing data; this study, however, takes advantage of tabulations from recent, economy-wide datasets. These datasets...

Using rich product level data on prices and quantities at the establishment level for Colombia, complemented with information on input use, we develop a methodological approach to decomposing output and sales growth over an establishment's life cycle. Our approach measures output at the...

Countries differ substantially in the extent to which more productive firms are large and/or are becoming larger and less productive firms are small and/or becoming smaller. A challenge for both emerging and advanced economies is that achieving such static and dynamic allocative efficiency...