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September 2007, Vol. 130, No. 9

Business Employment Dynamics data: survival and longevity, II

Amy E. Knaup and Merissa C. Piazza

This study is an extension of a research summary published in the Review in 2005.¹ That piece examined survival rates from a cohort of establishments from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program over a 4-year period. The study presented here extends the previous cohort an additional 3 years to create a 7-year survival analysis.

Data sources

The QCEW program contains information on 8.9 million U.S. business establishments in both the public and private sector. These monthly business establishment data are compiled on a quarterly basis for State unemployment insurance tax purposes and are edited and submitted to the BLS. A Federal-State cooperative venture between the BLS and the State Workforce Agencies, the QCEW program collects information covering approximately 98 percent of nonfarm payroll employment in the United States. Data generated by the program serve as the sampling frame for a range of BLS establishment surveys and as a benchmark for the Current Employment Statistics survey. Outside researchers use QCEW microdata to investigate topics in the field of labor economics, and such data are the largest single input to the Bureau of Economic Analysis personal income accounting program. QCEW program data also are used to generate gross job flows in the Business Employment Dynamics (BED) data series.

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Footnotes
1 Amy E. Knaup, "Survival and longevity in the Business Employment Dynamics data," Monthly Labor Review, May 2005, pp. 50–56.

Related BLS programs

Business Employment Dynamics

Related Monthly Labor Review articles

Survival and longevity in the Business Employment Dynamics data.—May 2005.
Business employment dynamics: new data on gross job gains and losses—April 2004.