About

Professor John C. Haltiwanger is a faculty member at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he holds the position of Professor of Economics. His contact information includes a telephone number, fax, and email address, indicating active engagement in academic and professional communication. The webpage references his recent papers, teaching activities, and keynote addresses, suggesting a focus on economic research and education. Additionally, he is associated with the Center for Economic Studies at the Bureau of the Census, which aligns with his research interests in economic data analysis, job flows, and firm-level productivity distributions. His work involves analyzing gross job flows, job creation and destruction, and cross-country data on economic activity, as evidenced by the mention of data and code for specific research papers and macroeconomic data from NBER. Overall, his profile reflects a strong emphasis on empirical research in macroeconomics, labor economics, and economic data analysis.

Research topics

• Economics
• Computer Science
• Macroeconomics
• Engineering
• Statistics
• Mathematics
• Monetary economics
• Mechanical engineering
• Econometrics
• Economic growth
• Business
• Labour economics

Selected publications

• Code for: Quality Adjustment at Scale: Hedonic vs Exact Demand-Based Price Indices

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-04-09

  datasetOpen access

  Item-level transactions data yield cost-of-living indices that can account for qualitychange and consumer substitution. Transactions data require confronting the rapidturnover of items because prices of new and existing products are interrelated in equilibrium. This paper evaluates multiple approaches to measuring quality change atscale. It shows that a hedonic superlative approach—using econometrics or machinelearning for hedonic estimation combined with index formulas that require simultaneousobservation of item-level price and expenditure—yields improved measures of thecost of living. Accounting for ubiquitous quality change and for consumer substitutionyields lower measures of inflation than traditional, official methods.

  PublisherDOI

• Code for: Quality Adjustment at Scale: Hedonic vs Exact Demand-Based Price Indices

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-04-09

  datasetOpen access

  Item-level transactions data yield cost-of-living indices that can account for qualitychange and consumer substitution. Transactions data require confronting the rapidturnover of items because prices of new and existing products are interrelated in equilibrium. This paper evaluates multiple approaches to measuring quality change atscale. It shows that a hedonic superlative approach—using econometrics or machinelearning for hedonic estimation combined with index formulas that require simultaneousobservation of item-level price and expenditure—yields improved measures of thecost of living. Accounting for ubiquitous quality change and for consumer substitutionyields lower measures of inflation than traditional, official methods.

  PublisherDOI

• Local Origins of Business Formation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Job Displacement and Earnings Losses: The Role of Joblessness

  American Economic Journal Macroeconomics · 2025-03-28 · 9 citations

  article

  A large literature finds that workers displaced in mass layoffs experience persistent earnings losses. We find that the earnings penalty from job displacement is mediated by the length of the jobless spell after displacement. Workers who experience little or no joblessness suffer no losses on average; those who experience a prolonged period of joblessness experience large, persistent earnings losses. Job movers who experience joblessness tend to move to lower-paying firms, a phenomenon that informs our understanding of the mechanisms that generate earnings losses. We also find that jobless duration predicts earnings outcomes for separators generally, not only displaced workers. (JEL E24, J24, J31, J62, J63, J64)

  PublisherDOI

• Firm growth and stagnation in the United States: Key trends and new data opportunities

  Strategic Management Journal · 2025-11-27

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Research Summary Using administrative data from the US Census Bureau, we introduce a new public‐use dataset (“Business Dynamics Statistics—High Growth” [BDS‐HG]) that captures the full distribution of firm growth in the United States between 1978 and 2021. BDS‐HG enables researchers to analyze not only high‐growth firms but also stagnant and shrinking firms, disaggregated by firm maturity, size, industry, region, and year. We begin by documenting two key trends: (1) a significant decline in the share of high‐growth firms—especially among young and small firms and (2) a marked rise in stagnant firms. To help illustrate the dataset's usefulness, we provide three empirical applications and highlight research opportunities across major areas of strategic management. In addition to supporting new analyses, BDS‐HG can be used to benchmark research samples and assess their generalizability. Managerial Summary The US economy has seen two major shifts in firm growth dynamics: a steady decline in the share of high‐growth firms—especially among startups—and a notable rise in firms that exhibit no growth. We document these patterns using BDS‐HG, a new public‐use dataset from the US Census Bureau that tracks employment growth across all US employer businesses from 1978 to 2021. The data are disaggregated by firm age, size, industry, geography, and year, enabling users to examine growth trends across sectors and regions. BDS‐HG offers a valuable resource for researchers, policymakers, and analysts seeking to understand long‐term business dynamism. It can also be used to benchmark research samples against national patterns, helping users assess how representative their data or findings are.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The (Heterogeneous) Economic Effects of Private Equity Buyouts

  Management Science · 2025-03-25 · 8 citations

  article

  The effects of private equity buyouts on employment, productivity, and job reallocation vary tremendously with macroeconomic and credit conditions, across private equity groups, and by type of buyout. We reach this conclusion by examining the most extensive database of U.S. buyouts ever compiled, encompassing thousands of buyout targets from 1980 to 2013 and millions of control firms. Employment shrinks 12% over two years after buyouts of publicly listed firms—on average, and relative to control firms—but expands 15% after buyouts of privately held firms. Postbuyout productivity gains at target firms are large on average and much larger yet for deals executed amid tight credit conditions. A postbuyout tightening of credit conditions or slowing of gross domestic product growth curtails employment growth and intrafirm job reallocation at target firms. We also show that buyout effects differ across the private equity groups that sponsor buyouts, and these differences persist over time at the group level. Rapid upscaling in deal flow at the group level brings lower employment growth at target firms. We relate these findings to theories of private equity that highlight agency problems at portfolio firms and within the private equity industry itself. This paper was accepted by David Sraer, finance. Funding: This work was supported by Harvard Business School’s Division of Research, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation [Grant no. 2014-0136], and the Private Capital Research Institute. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.03890 .

  PublisherDOI

• Financing, Ownership, and Performance: A Novel, Longitudinal Firm-Level Database

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Rising Top, Falling Bottom: Industries and Rising Wage Inequality

  American Economic Review · 2024-09-27 · 12 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Most of the rise in overall earnings inequality from 1996 to 2018 is accounted for by rising between-industry dispersion. The contribution of industries is right-skewed with the top 10 percent of four-digit NAICS industries dominating. The top 10 percent are clustered in high-paying high-tech and low-paying retail sectors. In the top industries, high-wage workers are increasingly sorted to high-wage industries with rising industry premia. In the bottom industries, low-wage workers are increasingly sorted into lowwage industries, with rising employment and falling industry wage premia. (JEL J23, J24, J31, L25, M52)

  PublisherDOI

• High tech business entry in the pandemic era

  FEDS Notes · 2024-04-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath have featured a surge in business entry (Decker and Haltiwanger 2024). A natural question is whether the elevated entry seen in recent years will have positive implications for aggregate productivity growth given the historically important role of business entry for productivity dynamics (Decker et al. 2014, Alon et al. 2018).

  PublisherDOI

• Declining responsiveness at the establishment level: Sources and productivity implications

  2024-02-14

  paratextOpen access

  This paper studies competing sources of declining dynamism. Evidence shows that an important component of this decline is accounted for by the reduction in the response of employment to shocks in US establishments. Using a plant-level dynamic optimization problem as a framework for analysis, four potential reasons for this decline are studied: (i) a change in exogenous processes for profits, (ii) an increase in impatience, (iii) increased market power, and (iv) increasing adjustment costs. We identify and quantity the contribution of each of these factors building on a simulated method of moments estimation of our structural model. Our results indicate that the reduction in responsiveness largely reflects increased costs of employment adjustment. Changes in market power, as captured by changes in the curvature of the revenue function, play a minimal role. But, in the presence of rising adjustment costs, measured sales-weighted markups using the recently popular indirect production approach rise substantially, along with rising dispersion and skewness of such measured markups.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Plant-Level Prices, Productivity Measurement and Industry Dynamics

  NSF · $358k · 2006–2013

• Economic Mobility: The Impact of Individual, Parent and Spatial Factors Using National Survey and Administrative Data

  NSF · $326k · 2017–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Steven J. Davis

  Hoover Institution

  410 shared

• Ron S. Jarmin

  United States Census Bureau

  204 shared

• Fredrik Andersson

  Statistics Sweden

  178 shared

• Javier Miranda

  173 shared

• Julia Lane

  RTI International

  130 shared

• Lucia Foster

  130 shared

• Cheryl Grim

  United States Census Bureau

  101 shared

• Mark Kutzbach

  88 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Johns Hopkins University

  1981

Awards & honors

• Julius Shiskin Award for economic statistics (2013)
• Roger Herriott Award for innovation in federal statistics (2…
• Global Entrepreneurship Research Award (2020)