As the largest federal statistical agency and primary collector of data on businesses, households and individuals, the Census Bureau each year conducts numerous surveys intended to provide statistics on a wide range of topics about the population and economy of the United States. The Census...

There remains considerable debate in the theoretical and empirical literature about the differences in the cyclical dynamics of firms by firm size. This paper contributes to the debate in two ways. First, the key distinction between firm size and firm age is introduced. The evidence presented in...

We examine the relationships between investments in information technology (IT) and two measures of retail firm performance -- productivity and establishment growth -- over the 1992 to 1997 period. We use untapped firm and establishment micro data from the Censuses of Retail Trade and the Assets...

This paper examines the trend in the importance of small producers in the Canadian and U.S. manufacturing sectors from the early 1970s to the late 1990s in order to investigate whether there was a common North American trend in changes in plant size. It finds that small plants in both countries...

Start-ups and other entrepreneurial ventures make a significant contribution to the US economy, particularly in the tech sector, where they comprise some of the largest and most influential companies. Yet for every high-profile, high-growth company like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google,...

Gross job flows dynamics, defined as the behavior of creation and destruction of jobs at the establishment level, has become a topic of great interest in economics during recent years and researchers have resorted to different empirical methodologies in order to tease out its causes and...

The dissertation offers an analysis of the labor reallocation process in Japan and sheds light on its relationship with productivity and output volatility during the 1990s, the period of sluggish growth. The first chapter provides descriptive statistics of job reallocation rates among relatively...

This thesis is comprised of three chapters. The first investigates the implications of industrial clustering for labor mobility and earnings dynamics. Motivated by a theoretical model in which geographically clustered firms compete for workers, I exploit establishment-level variation in...

This thesis is comprised of three chapters. The first chapter develops a statistical model that enriches the role that firms playin wage determination, allowing firms to influence both average wages as well as the returns to observable worker characteristics. I exploit the hierarchical nature of...