Recent evidence suggests the U.S. business environment is changing, with rising market concentration and markups. The most prominent and extensive evidence backs out firm-level markups from the first-order conditions for variable factors. The markup is identified as the ratio of the variable...

An important gap in most empirical studies of establishment-level productivity is the limited information about workers' characteristics and their tasks. Skill-adjusted labor input measures have been shown to be important for aggregate productivity measurement. Moreover, the theoretical...

A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers' subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed new survey measure of subjective uncertainty collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for approximately 25,000...

This paper describes the adoption of automation technologies by US firms across all economic sectors by leveraging a new module introduced in the 2019 Annual Business Survey, conducted by the US Census Bureau in partnership with the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES)....

We study the early adoption and diffusion of five AI-related technologies (automated-guided vehicles, machine learning, machine vision, natural language processing, and voice recognition) as documented in the 2018 Annual Business Survey of 850,000 firms across the United States. We find that...

Timely and accurate measurement of AI use by firms is both challenging and crucial for understanding the impacts of AI on the U.S. economy. We provide new, real-time estimates of current and expected future use of AI for business purposes based on the Business Trends and Outlook Survey for...