Business employment dynamics: New data on gross job gains and losses

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 127, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 29-42

  Spletzer, James R ^a   Faberman, R Jason ^a   Sadeghi, Akbar ^a   Talan, David M ^a   Clayton, Richard L ^b  

^a BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS   (United States)

^b Div of Admin Stat/Labour Turnover   (United States)

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EID: 14044252767     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (5)

1. For more details regarding the BLS gross job gain and gross job loss data and the underlying motivation for creating such data, see Timothy Pivetz, Michael Searson, and James Spletzer, "Measuring job and establishment flows With BLS longitudinal microdata," Monthly Labor Review, April 2001, pp. 13-20.
2. For more details of the BLS linkage methodology, see Kenneth Robertson, Larry Huff, Gordon Mikkelson, Timothy Pivetz, and Alice Winkler, "Improvements in Record Linkage Processes for the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Business Establishment List," in Proceedings for the 1997 Record Linkage Workshop and Exposition (Washington, DC, National Academies Press, 1999), pp. 212-21.
3. Two technical notes warrant mention. First, as stated earlier, the 3.1 million establishments with positive employment that do not change their employment across quarters are not counted as expanding, opening, contracting, or closing establishments in table 3. However, they are included in the count of all establishments used as the denominator to calculate the rates in table 4. Second, the definition of "active establishment" excludes the roughly 1 million establishments with zero employment in both quarters. Businesses in the UI system are allowed to report zero employment on their quarterly tax forms. A common example of a business that would report two consecutive quarters of zero employment is a seasonal business that is open only during several months of the year. Such a business would be counted as an opening establishment in the quarter that it moves from zero to positive employment and a closing establishment in the quarter that it moves from positive to zero employment. An establishment that reports zero employment in both the current and previous quarters is not counted as an active establishment. The preceding definitions, along with several exclusions for scope (such as government and private households), explain why the business employment dynamics data series reports roughly 6.4 million active establishments per quarter, whereas the QCEW program reports more than 8 million establishments per quarter.
4. The CES data used in chart 5 are the seasonally adjusted total private series.
5. For more information, visit the Business Employment Dynamics website at www.bls.gov/bdm.