In our last blog post, we explored how employment numbers are recorded among U.S. firms at a single point each year—March 12—and how this approach fails to capture the volatility of employment among small firms with 1–20 workers. In today’s post, we use new data from the SFD USA sample to further illustrate this point.

We launched the Small Firm Diaries because after decades of work trying to help microenterprises to grow into small firms, there was still very little work to describe and understand existing small firms . Given the dearth of data on small firms we created a simple dividing line between micro and small: at least one paid worker. Our delineation between small and medium was a bit more nebulous: no full-time, non-owner managers (we used less than 20 paid workers as a fuzzy prox