Kristin Sandusky

Bio: Kristin Sandusky is an academic researcher from United States Census Bureau. The author has contributed to research in topics: Capital intensity & Productivity. The author has an hindex of 12, co-authored 22 publications receiving 592 citations. Previous affiliations of Kristin Sandusky include Government of the United States of America.

Measuring the Gig Economy: Current Knowledge and Open Issues

Abstract: The rise of the “gig economy” has attracted wide attention from both scholars and the popular media. Much of this attention has been devoted to jobs mediated through various online platforms. While non-traditional work arrangements have been a perennial subject of debate and study, the perception that new technology is producing an accelerated pace of change in the organization of work has fueled a resurgence of interest in how such changes may be affecting both workers and firms. This paper provides a typology of work arrangements and reviews how different arrangements, and especially gig activity, are captured in existing data. A challenge for understanding recent trends is that household survey and administrative data paint a different picture, with the former showing little evidence of the growth in self-employment that would be implied by a surge in gig activity and the latter providing evidence of considerable recent growth. An examination of matched individual-level survey and administrative records shows that a large and growing fraction of those with self-employment activity in administrative data have no such activity recorded in household survey data. The share of those with self-employment activity in household survey data but not administrative data is smaller and has not grown. Promising avenues for improving the measurement of self-employment activity include the addition of more probing questions to household survey questionnaires and the development of integrated data sets that combine survey, administrative and, potentially, private data.

Measuring the Dynamics of Young and Small Businesses: Integrating the Employer and Nonemployer Universes

Abstract: We develop a preliminary version of an Integrated Longitudinal Business Database (ILBD) that combines administrative records and survey data for all employer and nonemployer business units in the United States. Unlike other large-scale business databases, the ILBD tracks business transitions from nonemployer to employer status. This feature of the ILBD opens a new frontier for the study of business formation, early lifecycle dynamics and the precursors to job creation in the U.S. economy. There are 5.4 million nonfarm business firms with employees as of 2000 and another 15.5 million with no employees. Our analysis focuses on 40 industries that account for nearly half of nonemployers and 36 percent of nonemployer revenues. Within these industries, nonemployers account for 14 percent of business revenues. About 220,000 of the seven million nonemployers in our selected industries hire workers and migrate to the employer universe over a three-year horizon. These Migrants account for 20 percent of revenue among young employers (three years or less since first hire). Compared to other nonemployers, the revenue of Migrants grows very rapidly in the year prior to and the year of transition to employer status.

The Relation among Human Capital, Productivity, and Market Value: Building Up from Micro Evidence

Abstract: This paper investigates and evaluates the direct and indirect contribution of human capital to business productivity and shareholder value. The impact of human capital may occur in two ways: the specific knowledge of workers at businesses may directly increase business performance, or a skilled workforce may also indirectly act as a complement to improved technologies, business models or organizational practices. We use newly created firm-level measures of workforce human capital and productivity to examine links between those measures and the market value of the employing firm. The new human capital measures come from an integrated employer-employee data base under development at the US Census Bureau. We link these data to financial information from Compustat at the firm level, which provides measures of market value and tangible assets. The combination of these two sources permits examination of the link between human capital, productivity, and market value. There is a substantial positive relation between human capital and market value that is primarily related to the unmeasured personal characteristics of the employees, which are captured by the new measures.

Technology and the Demand for Skill:An Analysis of Within and Between Firm Differences

Abstract: We estimate the effects of technology investments on the demand for skilled workers using longitudinally integrated employer-employee data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program infrastructure files spanning two Economic Censuses (1992 and 1997). We estimate the distribution of human capital and its observable and unobservable components within each business for each year from 1992 to 1997. We measure technology using variables from the Annual Survey of Manufactures and the Business Expenditures Survey (services, wholesale and retail trade), both administered during the 1992 Economic Census. Static and partial adjustment models are fit. There is a strong positive empirical relationship between advanced technology and skill in a cross-sectional analysis of businesses in both sectors. The more comprehensive measures of skill reveal that advanced technology interacts with each component of skill quite differently: firms that use advanced technology are more likely to use high-ability workers, but less likely to use high-experience workers. These results hold even when we control for unobservable heterogeneity by means of a selection correction and by using a partial adjustment specification.

Exploring Differences in Employment between Household and Establishment Data

Abstract: Using a large data set that links individual Current Population Survey (CPS) records to employer-reported administrative data, we document substantial discrepancies in basic measures of employment status that persist even after controlling for known definitional differences between the two data sources. We hypothesize that reporting discrepancies should be most prevalent for marginal workers and for marginal or nonstandard jobs, and we find systematic associations between the incidence of reporting discrepancies and observable person and job characteristics that are consistent with this hypothesis. The paper discusses the implications of the reported findings for both micro and macro labor market analysis.

What Determines Productivity

Abstract: Economists have shown that large and persistent differences in productivity levels across businesses are ubiquitous. This finding has shaped research agendas in a number of fields, including (but not limited to) macroeconomics, industrial organization, labor, and trade. This paper surveys and evaluates recent empirical work addressing the question of why businesses differ in their measured productivity levels. The causes are manifold, and differ depending on the particular setting. They include elements sourced in production practices -- and therefore over which producers have some direct control, at least in theory -- as well as from producers' external operating environments. After evaluating the current state of knowledge, I lay out what I see are the major questions that research in the area should address going forward. (JEL D24, G31, L11, M10, O30, O47)

Who Creates Jobs? Small versus Large versus Young

Abstract: The view that small businesses create the most jobs remains appealing to policymakers and small business advocates. Using data from the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics and Longitudinal Business Database, we explore the many issues at the core of this ongoing debate. We find that the relationship between firm size and employment growth is sensitive to these issues. However, our main finding is that once we control for firm age, there is no systematic relationship between firm size and growth. Our findings highlight the important role of business start-ups and young businesses in U.S. job creation.

Intangible capital and u.s. economic growth

Abstract: Published macroeconomic data traditionally exclude most intangible investment from measured GDP. This situation is beginning to change, but our estimates suggest that as much as $800 billion is still excluded from U.S. published data (as of 2003), and that this leads to the exclusion of more than $3 trillion of business intangible capital stock. To assess the importance of this omission, we add intangible capital to the standard sources-of-growth framework used by the BLS, and find that the inclusion of our list of intangible assets makes a significant difference in the observed patterns of U.S. economic growth. The rate of change of output per worker increases more rapidly when intangibles are counted as capital, and capital deepening becomes the unambiguously dominant source of growth in labor productivity. The role of multifactor productivity is correspondingly diminished, and labor's income share is found to have decreased significantly over the last 50 years.

Workplace Heterogeneity and the Rise of West German Wage Inequality

Abstract: We study the role of establishment-speci…c wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive …xed eects for work- ers and establishments are …t in four sub-intervals spanning the period from 1985 to 2009. We show that these models provide a good approximation to the wage struc- ture and can explain nearly all of the dramatic rise in West German wage inequality. Our estimates suggest that the increasing variability of West German wages has arisen from a combination of rising heterogeneity between workers, rising variability in the wage premiums at dierent establishments, and increasing assortativeness in the as- signment of workers to plants. In contrast, the idiosyncratic job-match component of wage variation is small and stable over time. Decomposing changes in mean wages between dierent education groups, occupations, and industries, we …nd that increas- ing plant-level heterogeneity and rising assortativeness in the assignment of workers to establishments explain a large share of the rise in inequality along all three dimensions.

Entrepreneurship 확산과 청년창업지원

Abstract: Entrepreneurship plays an important role in creating jobs, innovation and growth. Fostering entrepreneurship is a key policy goal for governments who expect that high rates of entrepreneurial activity will create sustainable jobs. Self-employment, also contributes to job creation in Europe, as 30% of the self-employed have employees of their own. European-level data indicate that the selfemployment sector has shown a degree of resilience during the recent economic crisis, as the relative decline in self-employment has been more moderate in comparison with salaried employment.