The pace of high-tech employment growth has been on a steady decline over the past two years. Despite growing substantially faster than total employment coming out of the Great Recession, job growth in high-tech industries and STEM occupations has slowed to match the anemic pace of job growth across the economy as whole. It goes without saying that a decline in these high-value jobs is not a welcome development for the U.S. economy.

All over the country, new and young businesses—as opposed to small businesses generally—play an outsized role in net job creation in the United States. But not all new businesses are the same—the majority of entrepreneurs to-be don't intend to grow their businesses or innovate. Differentiating growth-oriented “startups” from the rest of young businesses is an important distinction that we make in this latest paper. 

Is entrepreneurship everywhere, or is economic dynamism dead? With competing information afloat, that’s the question we sought to answer with newly-released Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) data from the Census Bureau. We found a couple of things. First, as the U.S. economy belatedly recovered in 2011, so did business creation--the first time in five years. Second, this growth in new business formation was geographically dispersed throughout the United States.