Earlier today, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart gave a speech at the Creative Leadership Summit of the Louise Blouin Foundation. He posed the questions: Is the economic dynamism of the United States declining? Is America losing its economic mojo? He observed:
“... we see a picture in which fewer firms are expanding, and each expanding firm is adding fewer new jobs on average than in the past. Fewer firms are shrinking, and each is downsizing by less on average. Fewer people are being laid off or are quitting their job, and firms are hiring fewer people. In other words, the employment dynamics of the U.S. economy are slower.
The decline in job creation and destruction was also the theme of this recent macroblog post by Mark Curtis, which featured some pretty nifty dynamic charts of trends in job creation and destruction by industry and geography.
Identifying the policy implications of these slower dynamics requires careful diagnosis of the causal factors underlying the trends. The cutting edge of economic research looking at this issue was featured at the 2013 Comparative Analysis of Enterprise Data Conference hosted last week by the Atlanta Census Research Data Center (ACRDC), which is housed at the Atlanta Fed and directed by one of our senior research economists, Julie Hotchkiss. Through the ACRDC, qualified researchers in Atlanta and around the Southeast can perform statistical analyses on non-public Census microdata.
The agenda and papers presented at the conference are located here. Some of the papers, I think, were particularly relevant to what President Lockhart discussed. A few examples:
“Reallocation in the Great Recession: Cleansing or Not?” by Lucia Foster and Cheryl Grim of the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau and John Haltiwanger at the University of Maryland looked at the so-called “cleansing hypothesis,” in which recessions are not only periods of outsized job creation and destruction, but they are also periods in which the reallocation is especially productivity enhancing. They find that while previous recessions fit this pattern reasonably well, they do not see this kind of activity in the most recent recession. In fact, they find that in the manufacturing sector, the intensity of reallocation fell rather than rose (because of the especially sharp decline in job creation), and the reallocation that did occur was less productivity enhancing than in prior recessions.
“How Firms Respond to Business Cycles: The Role of Firm Age and Firm Size,” by Javier Miranda, Teresa Fort, John Haltiwanger and Ron Jarmin, looked at the varying impact of recessions on firms by size and age. They show that young businesses (which are typically small) exhibit very different cyclical dynamics than small/older businesses and are more sensitive to the cycle than larger/older businesses. The paper also explores explanations for the finding that young/small businesses were hit especially hard during the last recession. They identify the collapse in housing prices as a primary culprit, with the decline in job creation at young firms especially pronounced in states with a large drop in housing prices.
As a side note, although not presented at the conference, “The Secular Decline in Business Dynamism in the U.S.,” a new paper by Ryan Decker, John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin and Javier Miranda, analyzes the overall secular decline in job reallocation across industries. They find that changes in industry composition (the decline in manufacturing and rise of service industries) are not driving the decline. Instead, the primary driver seems to be the decline in the pace of entrepreneurship and the accompanying decline in the share of young firms in the economy.
Finally, Steve Davis, from the University of Chicago, talked about his joint research with John Haltiwanger, Kyle Handley, Ron Jarmin, Josh Lerner and Javier Miranda on private equity in employment dynamics, Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses. Davis shows that private-equity buyouts are followed by a decline in net employment at these firms relative to controls (similar firms that were not targets of a buyout). However, that net change pales compared with the amount of gross job creation and destruction that typically occurs within the target firm after the buyout. In particular, he finds that in addition to reducing employment at its existing establishments, including by selling some establishments to other firms, jobs are created at new establishments within the firm via acquisition and the opening of new establishments. Moreover, they show that this reallocation is generally productivity enhancing for the firm. Although the data used in the study go only through the mid-2000s, it seems reasonable to infer from the findings that the decline in private equity deals during and since the last recession has contributed to the overall lower level of employment dynamics in this recovery.
The Comparative Analysis of Enterprise Date Conference was an excellent representation of the type of high-quality research being conducted on questions that go to the heart of the cyclical-versus-structural debate about the future course of the U.S. economy. While this is an exciting and important time for researchers in this field, it is troubling to learn that the programs that collect the data used in these types of studies are being trimmed because of federal budget cuts.
By John Robertson, vice president and senior economist in the Atlanta Fed’s research department