Who Creates Jobs? Small vs. Large vs. Young

John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin and Javier Miranda

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

Abstract: There’s been a long, sometimes heated, debate on the role of firm size in employment growth. Despite skepticism in the academic community, the notion that growth is negatively related to firm size remains appealing to policymakers and small business advocates. The widespread and repeated claim from this community is that most new jobs are created by small businesses. Using data from the Census Bureau Business Dynamics Statistics and Longitudinal Business Database, we explore the many issues regarding the role of firm size and growth that have been at the core of this ongoing debate (such as the role of regression to the mean). We find that the relationship between firm size and employment growth is sensitive to these issues. However, our main finding is that once we control for firm age there is no systematic relationship between firm size and growth. Our findings highlight the important role of business startups and young businesses in U.S. job creation. Business startups contribute substantially to both gross and net job creation. In addition, we find an “up or out” dynamic of young firms. These findings imply that it is critical to control for and understand the role of firm age in explaining U.S. job creation.

Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2010-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-lab and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (262)

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https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2010/CES-WP-10-17.pdf First version, 2010 (application/pdf)

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Working Paper: Who Creates Jobs? Small vs. Large vs. Young (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:10-17

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