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 decline has accelerated and become pervasive in the post-2000 period even in innovative-intensive sectors. The flip side of this change is an accompanying increase in the share of activity accounted for by mega (10,000 +) firms in the post-2000 period. While both benign and adverse factors may underlie these structural changes, the post-2000 period has also exhibited a decline in productivity growth along with indicators of business dynamism. The global pandemic has had a major adverse impact on health, morbidity, daily life, and economic activity. However, there has been a surge in new business applications that may signal a turning point in entrepreneurial activity.

High-frequency data from the U.S. Census Bureau during the COVID-19 pandemic: small vs. new businesses.

Small businesses experienced very sharp declines in activity, business sentiment, and expectations early in the pandemic. While there has been some recovery since then, multiple indicators of small business performance remained substantially in the negative range early in 2021. These findings are from a unique high frequency, real time, survey of small employer businesses, the Census Bureau's Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS). In contrast, results from the high frequency, real time, Business Formation Statistics (BFS) show there has been a surge in new business applications following an initial decline. Most of these applications are for likely nonemployers; however, there has also been a surge in new applications for likely employers, especially in Retail Trade (and especially Non-store Retailers). We compare and contrast the patterns from these two new high frequency data products that provide novel insights into the distinct patterns of dynamics for existing small businesses relative to new business formations.

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 substantial immigrant populations, we find that, on average, 37 % of an immigrant's coworkers are themselves immigrants; in contrast, only 14 % of a native-born worker's coworkers are immigrants. We decompose this difference into the probability of working with compatriots versus with immigrants from other source countries. Using human capital, employer, and location characteristics, we narrow the mechanisms that might explain immigrant concentration. We find that industry, language, and residential segregation collectively explain almost all the excess tendency to work with immigrants from other source countries, but they have limited power to explain work with compatriots. This large unexplained compatriot component suggests an important role for unmeasured country-specific factors, such as social networks.