Grown-Up Business Cycles

Benjamin Pugsley and Aysegul Sahin

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

Abstract: We document two striking facts about U.S. firm dynamics and interpret their significance for employment dynamics. The first is the dramatic decline in firm entry and the second is the gradual shift of employment toward older firms since 1980. We show that despite these trends, the lifecycle dynamics of firms and their business cycle properties have remained virtually unchanged. Consequently, aging is the delayed effect of accumulating startup deficits. Together, the decline in the employment contribution of startups and the shift of employment toward more mature firms contributed to the emergence of jobless recoveries in the U.S. economy.

Keywords: firm dynamics; employment dynamics; business cycles; entrepreneurship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2015-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-ent, nep-mac and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2015/CES-WP-15-33.pdf First version, 2015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Grown-up Business Cycles (2019)
Working Paper: Grown-up Business Cycles (2015)
Working Paper: Grown-up business cycles (2014)
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:wpaper:15-33

Access Statistics for this paper

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