John Haltiwanger
Biographic Data
| ID | 1104574 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Haltiwanger |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Haltiwanger |
| SIGNATURE | HALTIWANGER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6164-6938 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 65 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Increasing Earnings Inequality: Reconciling Evidence from Survey and Administrative Data
Analyses of survey data highlight observable person characteristics, such as education and occupation, as critical factors for rising earnings inequality, while industry has an offsetting effect. In contrast, analysis of administrative data highlights that rising between-firm earnings dispersion and, in turn, between-industry earnings dispersion dominates the rise in earnings inequality. We construct a novel integrated dataset based on CPS micro …
Entrepreneurship in the twenty-first century
Employer business startups contribute disproportionately to job creation, innovation, and productivity growth. This contribution is dynamic and complex involving much trial and error. Most startups fail or do not grow but a small fraction grow rapidly contributing substantially to economic performance. In the USA, there has been a decline in startup rate and the share of activity accounted for by young firms over the last couple of decades. This …
Job Creation in Colombia Versus the USA: ‘Up‐or‐out Dynamics’ Meet ‘The Life Cycle of Plants’
One of the most striking contrasts between the anatomies of the business sectors in higher‐ versus lower‐income economies is the overwhelming dominance of very small production units in the latter. Contrasting manufacturing sector data for Colombia and the USA, we show that weaker ‘up‐or‐out’ dynamics are behind this pattern and behind weaker average lifecycle growth. Dampened growth dynamics, not only in terms of upward mobility but also for exi…
Reconciling Survey and Administrative Measures of Self-Employment
Good information on self-employment is needed to inform the ongoing discussion of the rise of the gig economy and its implications for workers. Tax data show significant growth in self-employment not captured in the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS-ASEC). The growing gap reflects both self-employment in tax data missing from the CPS-ASEC and self-employment misreported as wage and salary work. We documen…
The Consequences of Long-Term Unemployment: Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data
That the long-term unemployed fare worse in the labor market than do the short-term unemployed is well-known, but why? One potential explanation is that the long-term unemployed are "bad apples" who had poorer prospects from the outset of their spells (heterogeneity). Another is that these bad outcomes are a consequence of their extended unemployment (state dependence). The authors use Current Population Survey data on unemployed individuals link…
Job Displacement and the Duration of Joblessness: The Role of Spatial Mismatch
This paper presents a new approach to the measurement of the effects of spatial mismatch that takes advantage of matched employeremployee administrative data integrated with a person-specific job accessibility measure, as well as demographic and neighborhood characteristics. We focus on a group of job searchers for plausibly exogenous reasons: lower-income workers with strong labor force attachment separated during a mass layoff. Our results supp…
The Slow Growth of New Plants: Learning about Demand
It is well known that new businesses are typically much smaller than their established industry competitors, and that this size gap closes slowly. We show that even in commodity-like product markets, these patterns do not reflect productivity gaps, but rather show differences in demand-side fundamentals. We document and explore patterns in plants’ idiosyncratic demand levels by estimating a dynamic model of plant expansion in the presence of a de…
Workplace Concentration of Immigrants
Casual observation suggests that in most U.S. urban labor markets, immigrants have more immigrant coworkers than native-born workers do. While seeming obvious, this excess tendency to work together has not been precisely measured, nor have its sources been quantified. Using matched employer–employee data from the U.S. Census Bureau Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) database on a set of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with subs…
The Role of Entrepreneurship in US Job Creation and Economic Dynamism
An optimal pace of business dynamics-encompassing the processes of entry, exit, expansion, and contraction-would balance the benefits of productivity and economic growth against the costs to firms and workers associated with reallocation of productive resources. It is difficult to prescribe what the optimal pace should be, but evidence accumulating from multiple datasets and methodologies suggests that the rate of business startups and the pace o…
Cross-Country Differences in Productivity: The Role of Allocation and Selection
This paper investigates the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. Exploiting harmonized firm-level data for a number of countries, we show that there is substantial and systematic cross-country variation in the within-industry covariance between size and productivity. We develop a model in which heterogeneous firms face adjustment frictions (overhead labor and quasi-fixed capital) and distortions. The mode…
Who Creates Jobs? Small versus Large versus Young
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 relationship between firm size and employment growth is sensitive to these issues. However, our main finding is that once we control for firm age, there …
Electricity Unit Value Prices and Purchase Quantities: U.S. Manufacturing Plants, 1963–2000
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 markedly until the late 1980s for large purchasers but rise over time for small purchasers. Unit value price gaps between larger and smaller purchasers are e…
Employer-to-Employer Flows in the United States: Estimates Using Linked Employer-Employee Data
We use administrative data linking workers and firms to study employer-to-employer (E-to-E) flows. After discussing how to identify such flows in quarterly data, we investigate their basic empirical patterns. We find that the pace of E-to-E flows is high, representing approximately 4% of employment and 30% of separations each quarter. The pace of E-to-E flows appears to be highly procyclical and varies systematically across worker, job, and emplo…
Factor Adjustments after Deregulation: Panel Evidence from Colombian Plants
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 labor surpluses reduce capital shedding. Moreover, we find that job destruction and capital formation increased after factor market deregulation in Colombia. …
Mom-and-Pop meet Big-Box: Complements or substitutes
In part due to the popular perception that Big-Boxes displace smaller, often family owned (a.k.a. Mom-and-Pop) retail establishments, several empirical studies have examined the evidence on how Big-Boxes' impact local retail employment but no clear consensus has emerged. To help shed light on this debate, we exploit establishment-level data with detailed location information from a single metropolitan area to quantify the impact of Big-Box store …
Entrepreneurship and Job Growth
Introduction and Overview Healthy market economies are dynamic, with a high pace of churning of jobs, workers and firms. In a healthy economy like that of the United States, this churning, through entrepreneurship, is productivity-enhancing with outputs and inputs being reallocated from less productive to more productive businesses on an ongoing basis. Moreover, in a closely related manner, in following entering cohorts of businesses in the Unite…
Reaching for the Stars: Who Pays for Talent in Innovative Industries
Innovative firms need to hire and motivate highly talented workers. This article connects the potential returns to innovation to the structure of compensation for skilled employees. We show that the software firms that operate in software sectors with high potential upside gains to innovation pay more to 'star' workers than do other firms that operate in stable markets. Firms operating in product domains with highly skewed positive returns pay em…
Reallocation, Firm Turnover, and Efficiency: Selection on Productivity or Profitability?
We investigate the nature of selection and productivity growth in industries where we observe producer-level quantities and prices separately. We show there are important differences between revenue and physical productivity. Because physical productivity is inversely correlated with price while revenue productivity is positively correlated with price, previous work linking (revenue-based) productivity to survival confounded the separate and oppo…
Using Worker Flows to Measure Firm Dynamics
Information on firm dynamics is critical to understanding economic activity, yet is fundamentally difficult to measure. In this article we introduce a new way of capturing dynamics: following clusters of workers as they move across administrative entities. We show that a worker flow approach improves linkages across firms in longitudinal business databases. The approach also provides conceptual insights into the changing structure of businesses a…
Market Selection, Reallocation, and Restructuring in the U.S. Retail Trade Sector in the 1990s
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 productivity dynamics. We find that virtually all of the labor productivity growth in the retail trade sector is accounted for by more productive entering es…
The Flow Approach to Labor Markets: New Data Sources and Micro-Macro Links
New data sources and products developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census highlight the fluid character of U.S. labor markets. Private sector job creation and destruction rates average nearly 8 percent of employment per quarter. Worker flows in the form of hires and separations are more than twice as large. The data also underscores the lumpy nature of micro-level employment adjustments. More than two-thirds of job de…
The effects of structural reforms on productivity and profitability enhancing reallocation: Evidence from Colombia
Aggregate Productivity Growth
This chapter seeks to synthesize and extend the emerging literature on the connection between micro- and aggregate productivity growth dynamics. It focuses primarily on the empirical findings and shows that the measured quantitative contribution of reallocation to aggregate productivity growth varies significantly across studies. The objective is to understand the sources of the differences in results across studies. It pursues this objective in …
Labor Productivity: Structural Change and Cyclical Dynamics
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 reallocation across plants over the cycle. We find that plant-level productivity is even more procyclical than aggregate productivity, because short-run rea…
Labor Statistics Measurement Issues
Rapidly changing technology, the globalization of markets, and the declining role of unions are just some of the factors that have led to dramatic changes in working conditions in the United States. Little attention has been paid to the difficult measurement problems underlying analysis of the labor market. Labor Statistics Measurement Issues helps to fill this gap by exploring key theoretical and practical issues in the measurement of employment…
The Role of Entrepreneurship in US Job Creation and Economic Dynamism
An optimal pace of business dynamics-encompassing the processes of entry, exit, expansion, and contraction-would balance the benefits of productivity and economic growth against the costs to firms and workers associated with reallocation of productive resources. It is difficult to prescribe what the optimal pace should be, but evidence accumulating from multiple datasets and methodologies suggests that the rate of business startups and the pace o…
Workplace Concentration of Immigrants
Casual observation suggests that in most U.S. urban labor markets, immigrants have more immigrant coworkers than native-born workers do. While seeming obvious, this excess tendency to work together has not been precisely measured, nor have its sources been quantified. Using matched employer–employee data from the U.S. Census Bureau Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) database on a set of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with subs…
Mom-and-Pop meet Big-Box: Complements or substitutes
In part due to the popular perception that Big-Boxes displace smaller, often family owned (a.k.a. Mom-and-Pop) retail establishments, several empirical studies have examined the evidence on how Big-Boxes' impact local retail employment but no clear consensus has emerged. To help shed light on this debate, we exploit establishment-level data with detailed location information from a single metropolitan area to quantify the impact of Big-Box store …
The effects of structural reforms on productivity and profitability enhancing reallocation: Evidence from Colombia
The Flow Approach to Labor Markets: New Data Sources and Micro-Macro Links
New data sources and products developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census highlight the fluid character of U.S. labor markets. Private sector job creation and destruction rates average nearly 8 percent of employment per quarter. Worker flows in the form of hires and separations are more than twice as large. The data also underscores the lumpy nature of micro-level employment adjustments. More than two-thirds of job de…
The Slow Growth of New Plants: Learning about Demand
It is well known that new businesses are typically much smaller than their established industry competitors, and that this size gap closes slowly. We show that even in commodity-like product markets, these patterns do not reflect productivity gaps, but rather show differences in demand-side fundamentals. We document and explore patterns in plants’ idiosyncratic demand levels by estimating a dynamic model of plant expansion in the presence of a de…
A Model of Inventory and Layoff Behaviour Under Uncertainty
Journal Article A Model of Inventory and Layoff Behaviour Under Uncertainty Get access John C. Haltiwanger, John C. Haltiwanger University of Maryland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Louis J. Maccini Louis J. Maccini The Johns Hopkins University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 98, Issue 392, 1 September 1988, Pages 731–745, https://doi.o…
The Consequences of Long-Term Unemployment: Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data
That the long-term unemployed fare worse in the labor market than do the short-term unemployed is well-known, but why? One potential explanation is that the long-term unemployed are "bad apples" who had poorer prospects from the outset of their spells (heterogeneity). Another is that these bad outcomes are a consequence of their extended unemployment (state dependence). The authors use Current Population Survey data on unemployed individuals link…
Responders Versus Non-Responders: A New Perspective on Heterogeneity
Journal Article Responders Versus Non-Responders: A New Perspective on Heterogeneity Get access John Haltiwanger, John Haltiwanger University of Maryland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Michael Waldman Michael Waldman University of California, Los Angeles and Cornell University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 101, Issue 408, 1 September …
Reaching for the Stars: Who Pays for Talent in Innovative Industries
Innovative firms need to hire and motivate highly talented workers. This article connects the potential returns to innovation to the structure of compensation for skilled employees. We show that the software firms that operate in software sectors with high potential upside gains to innovation pay more to 'star' workers than do other firms that operate in stable markets. Firms operating in product domains with highly skewed positive returns pay em…
A Model of Inventory and Layoff Behaviour Under Uncertainty
Journal Article A Model of Inventory and Layoff Behaviour Under Uncertainty Get access John C. Haltiwanger, John C. Haltiwanger University of Maryland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Louis J. Maccini Louis J. Maccini The Johns Hopkins University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 98, Issue 392, 1 September 1988, Pages 731–745, https://doi.o…
Responders Versus Non-Responders: A New Perspective on Heterogeneity
Journal Article Responders Versus Non-Responders: A New Perspective on Heterogeneity Get access John Haltiwanger, John Haltiwanger University of Maryland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Michael Waldman Michael Waldman University of California, Los Angeles and Cornell University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 101, Issue 408, 1 September …
Gross Job Creation, Gross Job Destruction, and Employment Reallocation
This study measures the heterogeneity of establishment-level employment changes in the U. S. manufacturing sector over the 1972 to 1986 period. We measure this heterogeneity in terms of the gross creation and destruction of jobs and the rate at which jobs are reallocated across plants. Our measurement efforts enable us to quantify the connection between job reallocation and worker reallocation, to evaluate theories of heterogeneity in plant-level…
Evidence on Macroeconomic Complementarities
This paper provides empirical evidence on macroeconomic complementarities, a restriction on the nature of interaction between individuals in a multi-agent setting. These models imply that activities across agents will be positively correlated, that discrete decisions will be synchronized and that disturbances will be magnified and propagated. The paper shows that these implications are consistent with aggregate observations as well as some microe…
Downsizing and productivity growth: Myth or reality
Job Creation and Destruction
A Comparison of Job Creation and Job Destruction in Canada and the United States
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. Pint, the Canadian and United States industry-level job creation and destruction rates are remarkably similar. Industries with high (low) job creation in the U.S. exhibit high (low) job…
Aggregate Productivity Growth
This chapter seeks to synthesize and extend the emerging literature on the connection between micro- and aggregate productivity growth dynamics. It focuses primarily on the empirical findings and shows that the measured quantitative contribution of reallocation to aggregate productivity growth varies significantly across studies. The objective is to understand the sources of the differences in results across studies. It pursues this objective in …
Labor Productivity: Structural Change and Cyclical Dynamics
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 reallocation across plants over the cycle. We find that plant-level productivity is even more procyclical than aggregate productivity, because short-run rea…
Labor Statistics Measurement Issues
Rapidly changing technology, the globalization of markets, and the declining role of unions are just some of the factors that have led to dramatic changes in working conditions in the United States. Little attention has been paid to the difficult measurement problems underlying analysis of the labor market. Labor Statistics Measurement Issues helps to fill this gap by exploring key theoretical and practical issues in the measurement of employment…
The effects of structural reforms on productivity and profitability enhancing reallocation: Evidence from Colombia
Market Selection, Reallocation, and Restructuring in the U.S. Retail Trade Sector in the 1990s
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 productivity dynamics. We find that virtually all of the labor productivity growth in the retail trade sector is accounted for by more productive entering es…
The Flow Approach to Labor Markets: New Data Sources and Micro-Macro Links
New data sources and products developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census highlight the fluid character of U.S. labor markets. Private sector job creation and destruction rates average nearly 8 percent of employment per quarter. Worker flows in the form of hires and separations are more than twice as large. The data also underscores the lumpy nature of micro-level employment adjustments. More than two-thirds of job de…
Using Worker Flows to Measure Firm Dynamics
Information on firm dynamics is critical to understanding economic activity, yet is fundamentally difficult to measure. In this article we introduce a new way of capturing dynamics: following clusters of workers as they move across administrative entities. We show that a worker flow approach improves linkages across firms in longitudinal business databases. The approach also provides conceptual insights into the changing structure of businesses a…
Reallocation, Firm Turnover, and Efficiency: Selection on Productivity or Profitability?
We investigate the nature of selection and productivity growth in industries where we observe producer-level quantities and prices separately. We show there are important differences between revenue and physical productivity. Because physical productivity is inversely correlated with price while revenue productivity is positively correlated with price, previous work linking (revenue-based) productivity to survival confounded the separate and oppo…
Entrepreneurship and Job Growth
Introduction and Overview Healthy market economies are dynamic, with a high pace of churning of jobs, workers and firms. In a healthy economy like that of the United States, this churning, through entrepreneurship, is productivity-enhancing with outputs and inputs being reallocated from less productive to more productive businesses on an ongoing basis. Moreover, in a closely related manner, in following entering cohorts of businesses in the Unite…
Reaching for the Stars: Who Pays for Talent in Innovative Industries
Innovative firms need to hire and motivate highly talented workers. This article connects the potential returns to innovation to the structure of compensation for skilled employees. We show that the software firms that operate in software sectors with high potential upside gains to innovation pay more to 'star' workers than do other firms that operate in stable markets. Firms operating in product domains with highly skewed positive returns pay em…
Factor Adjustments after Deregulation: Panel Evidence from Colombian Plants
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 labor surpluses reduce capital shedding. Moreover, we find that job destruction and capital formation increased after factor market deregulation in Colombia. …
Mom-and-Pop meet Big-Box: Complements or substitutes
In part due to the popular perception that Big-Boxes displace smaller, often family owned (a.k.a. Mom-and-Pop) retail establishments, several empirical studies have examined the evidence on how Big-Boxes' impact local retail employment but no clear consensus has emerged. To help shed light on this debate, we exploit establishment-level data with detailed location information from a single metropolitan area to quantify the impact of Big-Box store …
Employer-to-Employer Flows in the United States: Estimates Using Linked Employer-Employee Data
We use administrative data linking workers and firms to study employer-to-employer (E-to-E) flows. After discussing how to identify such flows in quarterly data, we investigate their basic empirical patterns. We find that the pace of E-to-E flows is high, representing approximately 4% of employment and 30% of separations each quarter. The pace of E-to-E flows appears to be highly procyclical and varies systematically across worker, job, and emplo…
Cross-Country Differences in Productivity: The Role of Allocation and Selection
This paper investigates the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. Exploiting harmonized firm-level data for a number of countries, we show that there is substantial and systematic cross-country variation in the within-industry covariance between size and productivity. We develop a model in which heterogeneous firms face adjustment frictions (overhead labor and quasi-fixed capital) and distortions. The mode…
Who Creates Jobs? Small versus Large versus Young
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 relationship between firm size and employment growth is sensitive to these issues. However, our main finding is that once we control for firm age, there …
Electricity Unit Value Prices and Purchase Quantities: U.S. Manufacturing Plants, 1963–2000
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 markedly until the late 1980s for large purchasers but rise over time for small purchasers. Unit value price gaps between larger and smaller purchasers are e…
Workplace Concentration of Immigrants
Casual observation suggests that in most U.S. urban labor markets, immigrants have more immigrant coworkers than native-born workers do. While seeming obvious, this excess tendency to work together has not been precisely measured, nor have its sources been quantified. Using matched employer–employee data from the U.S. Census Bureau Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) database on a set of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with subs…
The Role of Entrepreneurship in US Job Creation and Economic Dynamism
An optimal pace of business dynamics-encompassing the processes of entry, exit, expansion, and contraction-would balance the benefits of productivity and economic growth against the costs to firms and workers associated with reallocation of productive resources. It is difficult to prescribe what the optimal pace should be, but evidence accumulating from multiple datasets and methodologies suggests that the rate of business startups and the pace o…
Economics (31 works) · Labour economics (21 works) · Firm Innovation and Growth (20 works) · Business (16 works) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (14 works) · Macroeconomics (13 works) · Productivity (13 works) · Demographic economics (9 works) · Economic growth (9 works) · Global trade and economics (9 works)