The September 2016 release of BDS data contains data for 1976–2013 and includes tables by establishment characteristics in addition to tables by firm characteristics.

• Firm Characteristics Data Tables
• Establishment Characteristics Data Tables

Important Note: The BDS uses longitudinal information on firms and establishments to generate measures of business dynamics and job flows. Since information from multiple years is used to produce a statistic for any given year, having more years of data surrounding the year in question improves the quantity and quality of information used to generate the statistics. Thus, less information is available to generate the last year(s) of any given BDS release. Measures of job flows from firm and establishment births are especially sensitive to this source of measurement error and accordingly are more likely to be revised in subsequent releases.

Economic Census years (years ending in ‘2’ and ‘7’) present particular challenges in the computation of the BDS because of the integration of the Economic Census and the administrative data that underlies the BDS. The reconciliation of the Economic Census and administrative data takes time and involves substantial edits to the business micro data. The 2013 release of the BDS was the first covering an Economic Census year (years ending in 2 and 7) as a last year.

Further Background Information: We altered the timing of incorporating County Business Patterns (CBP) micro data edits into BDS processing due to the timing of the Economic Census. Edits to the CBP are available shortly before the public domain release of the CBP (typically in the Spring two years after the reference year). In non-Economic Census years, the CBP micro data edits were incorporated in the subsequent year release of the BDS because in previous years such edits were typically small. In an Economic Census year, CBP micro data edits are relatively large given the reconciliation of the Economic Census and administrative data. As such, the process for BDS 2012 was revised so that the BDS 2012 could incorporate the 2012 CBP micro edits. Future releases of the BDS will either be subsequent to the release of the CBP and/or take advantage of the procedures used by the CBP program to develop their micro business edits.

Legacy data tables for earlier versions of the BDS are available upon request.