The view that small businesses create the most jobs remains appealing to policymakers and small business advocates. Using data from the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics and Longitudinal Business Database, we explore the many issues at the core of this ongoing debate. We find that the...

Did inflation targets reduce the level of expected inflation in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom? In this note, predictions of forecasts by professional forecasters are constructed for five consecutive 12-month periods after the announcement of targets. These...

We adapt techniques from the literature on chaos and nonlinear dynamics to detect misspecification in models of serially independent data by checking for dependence between the regressors and disturbances. Our tests are nonparametric in that they determine whether the distribution of the...

We measure unit value electricity prices using 2 million annual observations on U.S. manufacturing plants from 1963 to 2000. These prices display tremendous cross-sectional dispersion, 85–95% of which reflects differences by plant location and purchase quantity. Spatial differentials decline...

The U.S. retail trade sector underwent a massive restructuring and reallocation of activity in the 1990s with accompanying technological advances. Using a data set of establishments in that sector, we quantify and explore the relationship between this restructuring and reallocation and labor...

A longstanding issue in empirical economics is the behavior of average labor productivity over the business cycle. This paper provides new insights into the cyclicality of aggregate labor productivity by examining the cyclical behavior of productivity at the plant level as well as the role of...

In recent years a growing number of countries have constructed data series on job creation and job destruction using establishment-level data sets. This paper provides a description and detailed comparison of these new data series for the United States and Canada. First, the Canadian and U.S....

This paper provides empirical evidence on macroeconomic complementarities, a restriction on the nature of interaction between individuals in a multiagent setting. These models imply that activities across agents will be positively correlated, that discrete decisions will be synchronized, and...

We analyze nonlinear adjustments of capital and labor using plant data from the Colombian Annual Manufacturing Survey, allowing for interdependence in adjustments of the two factors. We find nonlinear employment and capital adjustments. We also find that capital shortages reduce hiring, and...