Just Passing Through: Characterizing U.S. Pass-Through Business Owners

Nathan Goldschlag, J. Daniel Kim and Kristin McCue

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

Abstract: We investigate the use of administrative data on the owners of partnerships and S-corporations to develop new statistics that characterize business owners. Income from these types of entities is "passed through" to owners to be taxed on the owners' tax returns. The information returns associated with such pass-through entities (Form K1 records) make it possible to link individual owners to the businesses they own. These linkages can be leveraged to associate measures of the demographic and human capital characteristics of business owners with the characteristics of the businesses they own. This paper describes measurement issues associated with administrative records on these pass-through entities and their integration with other Census data products. In addition, we document a number of interesting trends in business ownership among pass-through entities. We show a substantial decline in both entry and exit with less churn among both owners and owned businesses. We also show that the owners of pass-through entities are older, more likely to be male, and more likely to be white compared to the working population.

Keywords: business owner; form K1; administrative data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2017-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2017/CES-WP-17-69.pdf First version, 2017 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:17-69

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