Age of firm rather than size matters for job creation in the US

Today, among other things, I have been analysing the fantastic dataset produced by the US Census bureau – Business Dynamics Statistics – which allows us to understand in much more detail, the underlying drivers of employment growth in the US by age and size of firm across sectors. I have done a lot of work on this topic in the past and this sort of dataset is a gold mine. It allows us, for example, to examine the veracity of the oft-repeated claims by conservative politicians and lobbyists that small business is the employment engine of the modern economies and all sorts of concessions and deregulation (mostly directed at underlying job security, wages and conditions for workers) are required to allow small business to do its work. The simple conclusion of today’s data analysis is that the age of the firm is more important in understanding net job creation in the US than the size of the firm. Here are some tentative results that may or may not be of interest.

Read more
Back To Top