The Promise and Potential of Linked Employer-Employee Data for Entrepreneurship Research

In this chapter, we highlight the potential for linked employer-employee data to be used in entrepreneurship research, describing new data on business startups, their founders and early employees, and providing examples of how they can be used to study the dynamics of new firms. Linked employer-employee data provide a unique perspective on new business creation by combining information on the business, workforce, and individual. By combining data on both workers and firms, linked data can answer many questions that owner-level or firm-level data cannot easily address alone—such as composition of the workforce at startups and their role in explaining business dynamics, the flow of workers across new and established firms, and the employment paths of the business owners themselves.