| ENTREPRENEURSHIP INDICATORS PROGRAMME (EIP) - TIMELY INDICATORS |
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United States |
Links, websites
Organisation
Source
- Administrative source
- Count of longitudinally-linked unemployment insurance (UI) administrative records submitted by 6.8 million private sector employers
- The Business Employment Dynamics (BED) data are a product of a federal-state cooperative program known as Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), or the ES-202 program. The BED data are compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) from existing quarterly state unemployment insurance (UI) records. Most employers in the U.S. are required to file quarterly reports on the employment and wages of workers covered by UI laws, and to pay quarterly UI taxes. The quarterly UI reports are sent by the State Employment Security Agencies (SESAs) to BLS and form the basis of the Bureau’s establishment universe sampling frame. In the BED program, the quarterly UI records are linked across quarters to provide a longitudinal history for each establishment. The linkage process allows the tracking of net employment changes at the establishment level, which in turn allows the estimation of jobs gained at opening and expanding units and jobs lost at closing and contracting units.
Content, coverage, definition
Technical note (BLS news release)
Openings. These are either units with positive third month employment for the first time in the current quarter, with no links to the prior quarter, or with positive third month employment in the current quarter following zero employment in the previous quarter.
Closings. These are either units with positive third month employment in the previous quarter, with no employment or zero employment reported in the current quarter.
Births. These are units with positive third month employment for the first time in the current quarter with no links to the prior quarter, or units with positive third month employment in the current quarter and zero employment in the third month of the previous four quarters. Births are a subset of openings not including reopenings of seasonal businesses.
Deaths. These are units with no employment or zero employment reported in the third month of four consecutive quarters following the last quarter with positive employment. Deaths are a subset of closings not including temporary shutdowns of seasonal businesses. A unit that closes during the quarter may be a death, but we wait three quarters to determine whether it is a permanent closing or a temporary shutdown. Therefore, there is always a lag of three quarters for the publication of death statistics.
For the purpose of BED statistics, births are defined as establishments that appear in the longitudinal database for the first time with positive employment in the third month of a quarter, or showed four consecutive quarters of zero employment in the third month followed by a quarter in which it shows positive employment in the third month.
Similarly, deaths are defined as establishments that either drop out of the longitudinal database or an establishment that had positive employment in the third month of a given quarter followed by four consecutive quarters of showing zero employment in the third month.
Although the data for establishment births and deaths are tabulated independently from the data for openings and closings, the concepts are not mutually exclusive. An establishment that is defined as a birth in a given quarter is necessarily an opening as well, and an establishment defined as a death in a quarter must also be a closing.
Since openings include seasonal, and other, re-openings and closings include temporary shutdowns, the not seasonally adjusted values for births and deaths must be less than those for openings and closings. However, because some BED series do not have many re-openings or temporary shutdowns, as well as the fact that births and deaths are independently seasonally adjusted from openings and closings, there may be instances in which the seasonally adjusted value of the former is greater than the latter.
Statistical units
Active establishments with employment
Total establishments QCEW program .........9.1 millions
Excluded: Public sector .........................0.3
Private households ................................0.7
Zero employment ..................................1.3
Establishments in Puerto Rico
and the Virgin Islands............................0.0
(less than 50,000)
Total establishments included in Business
Employment Dynamics data........................6.8 millions
Establishments are used in the tabulation of the BED statistics by industry and firms are used in the tabulation of the BED size class statistics. An establishment is defined as an economic unit that produces goods or services, usually at a single physical location, and engages in one or predominantly one activity. A firm is a legal business, either corporate or otherwise, and may consist of several establishments. Firm-level data are compiled based on an aggregation of establishments under common ownership by a corporate parent using employer tax identification numbers. The firm level aggregation which is consistent with the role of corporations as the economic decision makers are used for the measurement of the BED data elements by size class.
An employer can have one or more establishments. A large manufacturer, for example, might have several manufacturing plants, and each one would be considered a separate establishment. An establishment is an economic unit, such as a farm, mine, factory, or store, that produces goods or provides services. It is typically at a single physical location and engaged in one, or predominantly one, type of economic activity for which a single industrial classification may be applied. Occasionally, a single physical location encompasses two or more distinct and significant activities. Each activity should be reported as a separate establishment if separate records are kept and the various activities are classified under different NAICS industries.
Threshold (Size/turnover/Employer)
Private establishments with employment
Breakdowns (Activities/legal forms/size) - Exclusions
Major exclusions from UI coverage are self-employed workers, religious organizations, most agricultural workers on small farms, all members of the Armed Forces, elected officials in most States, most employees of railroads, some domestic workers, most student workers at schools, and employees of certain nonprofit organizations.
Total private includes unclassified sector not shown separately
2 intermediate groupings (goods producing and service providing)
Purity (Differences with the EIP harmonised definitions)
Private sector
Frequency
Quarterly - SA and gross
Period covered, timing
1992 - 2009
Published 8 months after the end of each quarter
Data
- Business Employment Dynamics Database
- Table 7: Private sector establishment births and deaths, seasonally adjusted
Data analysis
- The births and deaths of business establishments in the United States
- Business Employment Dynamics - News release
Bankruptcies
- US Bankruptcy statistics (monthly, quartlery, gross data, all private enterprises)
