New BLS Data Adds to Measures by Business Age

Apologies to my readers as I’ve been an absent blogger for the last couple of weeks with other work priorities.  But it’s exciting that I’ve only been absent a couple of weeks and there is so much to update on regarding entrepreneurship and innovation data!  So, I hope to catch up on postings in the coming week.

One of the biggest data releases of the year is a new series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  This is an extension of their population Business Employment Dynamics but one that adds more detail on two important measures – business age and survival – into their publically available series.  Dive into the data or read their overview of the release.

I plan to spend more time with this data in the next few weeks as it fits nicely into a paper I am writing.  For the time being, I looked at the data mostly to see if there was anything that looked really off or significantly different from a similar data release from the Census Bureau and I am pleased to not have many problems to report.  Perhaps the table that I found of most interest employment in surviving establishments.  BLS has done an outstanding job of presenting the data in a logical manner so that each cohort of establishments can be followed over time without difficulty.  So with this perspective, it becomes easy to see that on average after more than 15 years, only about a quarter of establishments are surviving but that these establishments have grown in employment over time from an average of 7 to about 17 employees.

The BLS release of this data continues a trend at U.S. statistical agencies to add age as a component of ongoing business measurement and public release.  It's a very exciting trend to see continuing and should bring more research in this area.  Also of note in the last few weeks on this topic is the publication of a "Who Creates Jobs? Small v.s Large vs. Young" by Haltiwanger, Jarmin, and Miranda.  This is a good overview of why looking at business age as a component of analysis in government data is an important issue when studying job creation. 

I should note that this is establishment data – not firm level data – so it doesn’t match perfectly with Census in that regard and will include both new companies and new locations of existing companies.