Chen Yeh, Ph.D.

Non-Employer Businesses

While visiting CESifo, Chen Yeh will continue to work on his current projects. In particular, he will focus on a project about non-employer businesses. While the majority of non-employer businesses are small and do not contribute significantly to aggregate revenues, a small fraction of these businesses do grow substantially and eventually become employers. However, the rate of these transitions has slowed down over the past few decades. Mr. Yeh and his coauthors show that this decline is quantitatively important for understanding the secular decline in US employer firm entry. Furthermore, they show that non-employers play an important role for so-called gazelles: those employers with a non-employer history grow significantly faster relative to their native counterparts.

Mr. Yeh's research interests revolve around the areas of firm dynamics and productivity. In particular, he focuses on heterogeneity at the firm level and its importance for the aggregate economy. To do so, he uses methods from the Industrial Organization literature and applies them to a variety of large-scale data sets including those from US administrative sources. Topics of previous papers include business cycle fluctuations, monetary policy and labor market power. These papers have been published in journals such as the American Economic Review and Review of Economic Studies.

Currently, Chen Yeh is working on several projects: 1) the dynamics of non-employer businesses and their contribution to the decline in US business dynamism (with Claudia Macaluso); 2) the effects of mergers and acquisitions on labor markets (with Michael Rubens and Bradley Setzler); and the importance of outsourced and leased workers for measuring and understanding US labor market dynamism (with Andrea Atencio and Claudia Macaluso)

Chen Yeh is a macroeconomist in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. He obtained his PhD from the University of Chicago.