We use worker-firm matched data from Homebase to construct new real-time estimates of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on employment and hours worked of small businesses. We find four key results: (1) employment of small businesses in four of the hardest hit service sectors contracted by an...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an explosion of research using private-sector datasets to measure business dynamics and employment in real-time. Yet questions remain about the representativeness of these datasets and how to distinguish business openings and closings from sample churn - i.e.,...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an explosion of research using real-time establishment-level data. One key challenge when working with this data is how to take into account the effects of business openings and closings. In this paper, we address this challenge by matching small business...