High Growth Young Firms: Contribution to Job, Output and Productivity Growth

John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, Robert Kulick and Javier Miranda

CARRA Working Papers from Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau

Abstract: Recent research shows that the job creating prowess of small firms in the U.S. is better attributed to startups and young firms that are small. But most startups and young firms either fail or don’t create jobs. A small proportion of young firms grow rapidly and they account for the long lasting contribution of startups to job growth. High growth firms are not well understood in terms of either theory or evidence. Although the evidence of their role in job creation is mounting, little is known about their life cycle dynamics, or their contribution to other key outcomes such as real output growth and productivity. In this paper, we enhance the Longitudinal Business Database with gross output (real revenue) measures. We find that the patterns for high output growth firms largely mimic those for high employment growth firms. High growth output firms are disproportionately young and make disproportionate contributions to output and productivity growth. The share of activity accounted for by high growth output and employment firms varies substantially across industries - in the post 2000 period the share of activity accounted for by high growth firms is significantly higher in the High Tech and Energy related industries. A firm in a small business intensive industry is less likely to be a high output growth firm but small business intensive industries don’t have significantly smaller shares of either employment or output activity accounted for by high growth firms.

Date: 2017-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-ino and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/ ... carra-wp-2017-03.pdf First version, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: High Growth Young Firms: Contribution to Job, Output, and Productivity Growth (2016)
Working Paper: High Growth Young Firms: Contribution to Job, Output and Productivity Growth (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:cpaper:2017-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CARRA Working Papers from Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson ().