Lucia Foster

this chart is a nice encapsulation of the economic trajectory over the past 2 weeks... Expectations less awful, but present reality getting slightly worse.

22.05.2025 15:03 — 👍 8    🔁 5    💬 0    📌 0

The Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) underpins many studies of firm-level behavior. It tracks longitudinally all employers in the nonfarm private sector but lacks information about business financing and owner characteristics. We address this shortcoming by linking LBD observations to firm-level data drawn from several large Census Bureau surveys. The resulting Longitudinal Employer, Owner, and Financing (LEOF) database contains more than 3 million observations at the firm-year level with information about start-up financing, current financing, owner demographics, ownership structure, profitability, and owner aspirations – all linked to annual firm-level employment data since the firm hired its first employee. Using the LEOF database, we document trends in owner demographics and financing patterns and investigate how these business characteristics relate to firm-level employment outcomes.

A line chart titled "Figure 1. Distribution of Firm Four-Year Growth Rates, 2002 to 2018 (Employment Weighted)." The x-axis represents the percentile of employment growth (ranging from 0 to 99), while the y-axis shows the average annual percent employment change (ranging from -200% to 200%).

📈📉New Census Working Paper: "Financing, Ownership, and Performance: A Novel, Longitudinal Firm-Level Database" by J. David Brown, Steven J. Davis, Lucia Foster (@lucia-econ.bsky.social), John Haltiwanger (@jchaltiwangerum.bsky.social), and John Sabelhaus www.census.gov/library/work...

11.12.2024 22:02 — 👍 6    🔁 3    💬 1    📌 0

Glad to see folks here talking about the recent surge in entrepreneurship. While much is still unknown, we already have a lot of color on this striking development. Short thread of joint work w/ @jchaltiwangerum.bsky.social

25.11.2024 02:24 — 👍 21    🔁 6    💬 1    📌 0

I’ve seen some folks on here sharing the Census Bureau business application data.

One thought for anybody looking at this data - it’s probably worth focusing on the “high-propensity” segment - ie high propensity to become a business with payroll.

25.11.2024 00:46 — 👍 17    🔁 4    💬 2    📌 1

Pandemic Start-Ups Are Thriving, and Helping to Fuel the Economy A record surge in new businesses has helped drive job growth, and could have longer-term benefits.

www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/b...

25.11.2024 01:34 — 👍 16    🔁 3    💬 1    📌 1

Surging business formation in the pandemic: Causes and consequences?

Ryan Decker and I have studied the surge in new business applications finding that it has led to a surge in new employer businesses. See:
www.brookings.edu/articles/sur...

25.11.2024 01:30 — 👍 12    🔁 3    💬 1    📌 4

NAS Report on AI and the Future of Work Released today:
www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/aut...

21.11.2024 16:32 — 👍 15    🔁 7    💬 1    📌 1

The US Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey shows that AI adoption by US firms has risen to 6% the highest on record. (Data goes back to late 2023.)

Additionally, the share of firms *planning* to use AI has risen north of 9%.

18.11.2024 14:20 — 👍 26    🔁 3    💬 0    📌 0

Could you add me? Thank you!

18.11.2024 23:05 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

The international empirics of management A country's national income broadly depends on the quantity and quality of workers and capital. But how well these factors are managed within and between firms may be a key determinant of a country's productivity and its GDP. Although social scientists have long studied the role of management practices in shaping business performance, their primary tool has been individual case studies. While useful for theory-building, such qualitative work is hard to scale and quantify. We present a large, scalable dataset measuring structured management practices at the business level across multiple countries. We measure practices related to performance monitoring, target-setting, and human resources. We document a set of key stylized facts, which we label 'the international empirics of management'. In all countries, firms with more structured practices tend to also have superior economic performance: they are larger in scale, are more profitable, have higher labor productivity and are more likely to export. This consistency was not obvious ex-ante, and being able to quantify these relationships is valuable. We also document significant variation in practices across and within countries, which is important in explaining differences in the wealth of nations. The positive relationship between firm size and structured management practices is stronger in countries with more open and free markets, suggesting that stronger competition may allow firms with more structured management practices to grow larger, thereby potentially raising aggregate national income.

The international empirics of management | Read the latest article by Nick Bloom, Renata Lemos, @raffasadun.bsky.social , @danielascur.bsky.social and @johnvanreenen.bsky.social for PNAS

poid.lse.ac.uk/PUBLI...

10.11.2024 11:00 — 👍 8    🔁 6    💬 0    📌 0

New Economic and Social Science Research Published in the CES Working Paper Series

New Economic and Social Science Research Published in the CES Working Paper Series 🧵 content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USC...

04.10.2024 19:41 — 👍 2    🔁 3    💬 1    📌 0

I made a starter pack of government economists.

go.bsky.app/K7fAcMi

18.09.2024 00:34 — 👍 133    🔁 62    💬 7    📌 10

New paper "Early Career Paths of Economists Inside and Outside of Academia" in Journal of Economic Perspectives with Danielle Sandler and @erikamcentarfer.bsky.social in pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

06.11.2023 17:03 — 👍 7    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 1

Early Career Paths of Economists inside and outside of Academia (Fall 2023) - Economics job candidates face considerable professional and financial uncertainties when deciding between academic and nonacademic career paths. Using novel panel data, we provide a broa...

Foster, Lucia, Erika McEntarfer, and Danielle H. Sandler in the Journal of Economic Perspectives: "Early Career Paths of Economists inside and outside of Academia"
www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

03.11.2023 15:46 — 👍 4    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0