Business cycle fluctuations have long run effects on a number of economic variables. For instance, if you enter the labor force during a recession, your wages are harmed for many years afterward. Many other economic parameters revert to trend, leaving a past recession just a blip on the horizon. Sara Moreira, a job candidate from the University of Chicago, investigates in her job market paper whether entrepreneurship changes induced by recessions persist in the long run.
New firm formation is procyclical: entrepreneurship fell roughly 20 percent during the recent recession. Looking back at the universe of private firms since the late 1970s, Moreira shows that this procyclicality is common, and that the firms that do form during recessions tend to be smaller than those which form during booms. Incredibly, this size gap persists for at least a decade after the firms are founded! At first glance, this is crazy: if my firm is founded during the 2001 recession, surely any effects from my founding days should have worn off after a decade of introducing new products, hiring new staff, finding new funding sources, etc. And yet Moreira finds this effect no matter how you slice the data, using overall recessions, industry-specific shocks, shocks based on tradable versus nontradable commodities, and so on, and it remains even when accounting for the autocorrelation of the business cycle. The effect is not small: the average firm born during a year with above trend growth is roughly 2 percent larger 10 years later than the average firm born during below trend growth years.
This gap is double surprising if you think about how firms are founded. Imagine we are in middle of a recession, and I am thinking of forming a new construction company. Bank loans are probably tough to get, I am unlikely to be flush with cash to start a new spinoff, I may worry about running out of liquidity before demand picks up, and so on. Because of these negative effects, you might reasonably believe that only very high quality ideas will lead to new firms during recessions, and hence the average firms born during recessions will be the very high quality, fast growing, firms of the future, whereas the average firms born during booms will be dry cleaners and sole proprietorships and local restaurants. And indeed this is the case! Moreira finds that firms born during recessions have high productivity, are more likely to be in high innovation sectors, and and less likely to be (low-productivity) sole proprietorships. We have a real mystery, then: how can firms born during a recession both be high quality and find it tough to grow?
Moreira considers two stories. It may be that adjustment costs matter, and firms born small because the environment is recessionary find it too costly to ramp up in size when the economy improves. Moreira finds no support for this idea: capital-intensive industries show the same patterns as industries using little capital.
Alternatively, customers need to be acquired, and this acquisition process may generate persistence in firm size. Naturally, firms start small because it takes time to teach people about products and for demand to grow: a restaurant chain does not introduce 1000 restaurants in one go. If you start really small because of difficulty in getting funded, low demand, or any other reason, then in year 2 you have fewer existing customers and less knowledge about what consumers want. This causes you to grow slower in year 2, and hence in year 3, you remain smaller than firms that initially were large, and the effect persists every year thereafter. Moreira finds support for this effect: among other checks, industries whose products are more differentiated are the ones most likely to see persistence of size differences.
Taking this intuition to a Hopenhayn-style calibrated model, the data tells us the following. First, it is not guaranteed that recessions lead to smaller firms initially, since the selection of only high productivity ideas into entrepreneurship during recessions, and the problem of low demand, operate in opposite directions, but empirically the latter seems to dominate. Second, if the productivity distribution of new firms were identical during booms and recessions, the initial size difference between firms born during booms and recessions would be double what we actually observe, so the selection story does in fact moderate the effect of the business cycle on new firm size. Third, the average size gap does not close even though the effect of the initial demand shock, hence fewer customers in the first couple years and slower growth thereafter, begins to fade as many years go by. The reason is that idiosyncratic productivity is mean reverting, so the average (relatively low quality at birth) firm born during booms that doesn’t go out of business becomes more like an average overall firm, and the average (relatively high productivity at birth) firm born during recessions sees its relative productivity get worse. Therefore, the advantage recession-born firms get from being born with high quality firms fades, countering the fading harm of the size of these firms from the persistent demand channel. Fourth, the fact that high productivity firms born during recessions grow slowly due to the historic persistence of customer acquisition means that temporary recessions will still affect the job market many years later: the Great Recession, in Moreira’s calibration, will a decade later still be chewing up 600,000 jobs that firms from the 2008-2009 cohort would have employed. Really enjoyed this paper: it’s a great combination of forensic digging through the data, as well as theoretically well-founded rationalization of the patterns observed.
January 2016 working paper. Moreira also has interesting slides showing how to link the skilled wage premium to underlying industry-level elasticities in skilled and unskilled labor. She notes that as services become more important, where labor substitutability is more difficult, the effect of technological change on the wage premium will become more severe.
A Fine Theorem 