Working Paper: NBER ID: w28839
Authors: Melissa C. Chow; Teresa C. Fort; Christopher Goetz; Nathan Goldschlag; James Lawrence; Elisabeth Ruth Perlman; Martha Stinson; T. Kirk White
Abstract: In this paper we describe the U.S. Census Bureau's redesign and production implementation of the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) first introduced by Jarmin and Miranda (2002). The LBD is used to create the Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS), tabulations describing the entry, exit, expansion, and contraction of businesses. The new LBD and BDS also incorporate information formerly provided by the Statistics of U.S. Businesses program, which produced similar year-to-year measures of employment and establishment flows. We describe in detail how the LBD is created from curation of the input administrative data, longitudinal matching, retiming of economic census-year births and deaths, creation of vintage consistent industry codes and noise factors, and the creation and cleaning of each year of LBD data. This documentation is intended to facilitate the proper use and understanding of the data by both researchers with approved projects accessing the LBD microdata and those using the BDS tabulations.
Keywords: Longitudinal Business Database; Business Dynamics Statistics; Employment Changes; Firm Dynamics
JEL Codes: D0; E0; F0; J0; L0
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| LBD (Y60) | year-to-year changes in private-sector employment (J63) |
| LBD (Y60) | entry and exit of businesses (M13) |
| LBD facilitates understanding of employment changes (J23) | employment changes (J63) |
| retiming algorithms (C41) | improved data accuracy (Y10) |
| improved data accuracy (Y10) | understanding of business dynamics (M21) |