Business employment dynamics: Annual tabulations

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 132, Issue 5, 2009, Pages 45-56

  Sadeghi, Akbar ^a   Spletzer, James R ^a   Talan, David M ^a  

^a BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS   (United States)

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EID: 69549131135     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. This endnote summarizes the data sources and flows underlying the QCEW data. All employers subject to State unemployment insurance laws are required to submit quarterly contribution reports detailing their level of employment by month and wages by quarter to the State employment security agencies. The raw data require substantial editing and review. In addition, BLS directs the States to conduct two supplemental surveys that are necessary to yield accurate data at the local level. The first is the Annual Refiling Survey, for which the States contact nearly 2 million businesses each year to obtain or update business names, addresses, industry codes, and related contact information. The second survey is the Multiple Worksite Report, which collects employment and wage information for each establishment in multiunit firms within the State. The Multiple Worksite Report covers about 110,000 businesses (1.4 percent of all firms, 16 percent of all establishments, and 39 percent of employment) each quarter, allowing for the matching of employment and wage data with the correct county and industry. After the raw data are augmented by the data from the Annual Refiling Survey and Multiple Worksite Report and are then thoroughly edited by the State Labor Market Information staff, the States submit these data and other business identification information to BLS as part of the QCEW program.
2. For more detail on the construction of the BED data, see James R. Spletzer, R. Jason Faberman, Akbar Sadeghi, David M. Talan, and Richard L. Clayton, "Business employment dynamics: new data on gross job gains and losses," Monthly Labor Review, April 2004, pp. 29-4
3. For more detail on the definitions of establishment births and establishment deaths, see Akbar Sadeghi, "The births and deaths of business establishments in the United States," Monthly Labor Review, December 2008, pp. 3-18. BEDbirth and death statistics are available at the BED website at www.bls.gov/bdm (visited May 21, 2009).
4. Three research papers document this finding. First, see Joshua C. Pinkston and James R. Spletzer, "Annual Measures of Job Creation and Job Destruction Created from Quarterly Microdata," American Statistical Association 2002 Proceedings of the Section on Business and Economic Statistics, pp. 3311-16.
5. For a more complete discussion of the differences between an annual statistic and the sum of four quarterly statistics, see Pinkston and Spletzer, "Annual measures of gross job gains and gross job losses.".
6. The authors acknowledge and appreciate the comments of Ron Jarmin and Javier Miranda of the U.S. Census Bureau, who reviewed a prepublication draft of this article.
7. The press release from the U.S. Census Bureau announcing the BDS data series can be found at www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/employment_occupations/013012.html (visited April 2, 2009).
8. This quote is from www.ces.census.gov/index.php/bds/bds_overview#_Concepts_and_Methodology (visited April 2, 2009). Note that the BDS program uses the terms "gross job gains" and "gross job losses" in its technical documentation, yet it uses the terms "job creation" and "job destruction" in its downloadable database. This article uses the terms "gross job gains" and "gross job losses" when comparing BED data with BDS data.
9. The two series have strengths and weaknesses relative to each other. Users who want data that are more current will need to use the BED data, whereas users who want a time series dating back to the 1970s will need to use the BDS data.
10. In the BDS database, the level of employment for the second quarter of 1998 is 106.6 million jobs. This is 4.4 million higher than the BED level of employment for the second quarter of 1998 (as published in Pinkston and Spletzer, "Annual measures of gross job gains and gross job losses"). The BDS level of employment is consistently higher than the BED level, and the difference grows over the 1998-2002 period; the difference is 6.4 million in the first quarter of 2002.
11. The BDS program's technical documentation focuses on the terms openings and closings, whereas the downloadable BDS database uses the terms "entries" and "exits" as well as births and deaths. This article uses the terms openings and closings.