Changing Business Dynamism and Productivity: Shocks vs. Responsiveness

John Haltiwanger is also a Schedule A part-time employee of the Census Bureau at the time of the writing of this paper. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Kauffman Foundation. Cody Tuttle provided excellent research assistance. We thank John Abowd, Rudi Bachmann, Martin Baily, Jonathan Baker, Dave Byrne, Chris Foote, Lucia Foster, Clément Gorin, Bronwyn Hall, Matthias Kehrig, Pete Klenow, Kristin McCue, and conference or seminar participants at the 2015 Atlanta Fed Conference on Secular Changes in Labor Markets, the ASSA 2016 meetings, the 2016 Brookings “productivity puzzle” conference, the 3rd International ZEW conference, the 2016 ICC conference, BYU, University of Chicago, Drexel University, the Federal Reserve Board, George Mason University, Georgetown University, Michigan State University, the New York Fed, Princeton University, the Richmond Fed, the spring 2017 Midwest Macro meetings, the 2017 UNC IDEA conference, and the 2017 NBER Summer Institute meetings for helpful comments. We are grateful for the use of the manufacturing productivity database developed in Foster, Grim and Haltiwanger (2016) as well as the revenue productivity database developed in Haltiwanger et al. (2017), and we thank Peter Schott for providing guidance and data for constructing import penetration data. Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau, the Board of Governors, its staff, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. All results have been reviewed to ensure that no confidential information is disclosed.