We document two striking facts about U.S. firm dynamics and interpret their significance for aggregate employment dynamics. The first observation is the steady decline in the firm entry rate over the last thirty years, and the second is the gradual shift of employment from younger to older firms...

The U.S. economy has been going through a striking structural transformation - the secular reallocation of employment across sectors - over the past several decades. We propose a decomposition framework to assess the contributions of various margins of firm dynamics to this shift. Using...

We propose a simple explanation for the long-run decline in the startup rate. It was caused by a slowdown in labor supply growth since the late 1970s, largely pre-determined by demographics. This channel explains roughly two-thirds of the decline and why incumbent firm survival and average...

The U.S. economy has been going through a striking structural transformation - the secular reallocation of employment across sectors - over the past several decades. We propose a decomposition framework to assess the contributions of various margins of firm dynamics to this shift. Using...

We document two striking facts about U.S. firm dynamics and interpret their significance for aggregate employment dynamics. The first observation is the steady decline in the firm entry rate over the last thirty years, and the second is the gradual shift of employment from younger to older firms...

We propose a simple explanation for the long-run decline in the startup rate. It was caused by a slowdown in labor supply growth since the late 1970s, largely pre-determined by demographics. This channel explains roughly two-thirds of the decline and why incumbent firm survival and average...