Benjamin Pugsley

What Do Small Businesses Do

We show that most small business owners are very different from the entrepreneurs that economic models and policymakers often have in mind. Using new data that sample entrepreneurs just before they start their businesses, we show that few small businesses intend to bring a new idea to market or to enter an unserved market. Instead, most intend to provide an existing service to an existing market. Further, we find that most small businesses have little desire to grow big or to innovate in any observable way. We show that such behavior is consistent with the industry characteristics of the majority of small businesses, which are concentrated among skilled craftspeople, lawyers, real estate agents, health care providers, small shopkeepers, and restaurateurs. Lastly, we show that nonpecuniary benefits (being ones own boss, having flexibility of hours, and the like) play a first-order role in the business formation decision. Our findings suggest that the importance of entrepreneurial talent, entrepreneurial luck, and financial frictions in explaining the firm size distribution may be overstated. We conclude by discussing the potential policy implications of our findings.

Wealth, Tastes, and Entrepreneurial Choice

The nonpecuniary benefits of managing a small business are a first order consideration for many nascent entrepreneurs, yet the preference for business ownership is mostly ignored in models of entrepreneurship and occupational choice. In this paper, we study a population with varying entrepreneurial tastes and wealth in a simple general equilibrium model of occupational choice. This choice yields several important results: (1) entrepreneurship can be thought of as a normal good, generating wealth effects independent of any financing constraints; (2) nonpecuniary entrepreneurs select into small-scale firms; and (3) subsidies designed to stimulate more business entry can have regressive distributional effects. Despite abstracting from other important considerations such as risk, financing constraints, and innovation, we show that nonpecuniary compensation is particularly relevant in discussions of small businesses.

Grown-up Business Cycles

The entry rate of U.S. employer businesses has declined for more than 30 years. We use a novel dynamic decomposition framework to show that regardless of its causes, the direct effects of the continued decline in the entry rate and its delayed effects on the firm age distribution together play a major role in the slowing of trend employment growth and the emergence of jobless recoveries. We identify changing demographic structure of the population and increased import competition as leading factors behind the decline in startup activity.Received September 1, 2015; editorial decision April 5, 2018 by Editor Francesca Cornelli. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

The Nature of Firm Growth

There are vast differences in the growth patterns of firms: high-growth, young businesses, or “gazelles”, account for the vast majority of employment growth at incumbent firms. Using a large administrative panel data set for the United States, we provide evidence that ex-ante differences in the growth potential of firms account for most of the size heterogeneity across firms of a given age. First, we estimate a reduced-form employment process, allowing for heterogeneity in steady-state levels and deriving parameter identification from the autocovariance function of employment. Next, we estimate a general equilibrium firm dynamics model and explore the implications for firm selection and the macro effects of firm-level distortions.

The Role of Start-Ups in Structural Transformation

The U.S. economy has been going through a striking structural transformation—the secular reallocation of employment across sectors—over the past several decades. We propose a decomposition framework to assess the contributions of various margins of firm dynamics to this shift. Using firm-level data, we find that at least 50 percent of the adjustment has been taking place along the entry margin, owing to sectors receiving shares of start-up employment that differ from their overall employment shares. The rest is mostly the result of life cycle differences across sectors. Declining overall entry has a small but growing effect of dampening structural transformation.

Essays on Small Business: Executive Summary

Small businesses range from corner stores to high-tech startups and account for nearly all businesses in the United States. In part because of their small size, these businesses are intimately connected with their owners. This dissertation considers two important aspects of this connection. First, I study the role of the entrepreneurial tastes of small business owners in explaining the existence and variety among small businesses. Second, I consider the possibility of underreporting income both to tax authorities and to the surveys economists use to study entrepreneurship, savings, and income in the population.