Data Appendix for “ Firm Age , Investment Opportunities , and Job Creation ” ∗

We use the publicly-available Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) published by the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program of the U.S. Census Bureau to compute total employment by firm age.1 This dataset provides total employment2 in the private sector tabulated for 5 firm age categories—start-ups (0-1 year-olds), 2-3 year-olds, 4-5 year-olds, 6-10 year-olds, and firms over 11 years old. The totals are provided by county, quarter and industry, where industry is defined at the 2-digit National American Industry Classification System (NAICS) level. For the purposes of our analysis, and as we point out in the paper, we aggregate the county-level observations in each age category to the Commuting-zone level,3 and we transform this quarterly data into annual data by using the data in the last quarter of each year. The analysis focuses on firms in the non-tradable sector, namely Retail Trade (2-digit NAICS 44-45), and Accommodation and Food Services (2-digit NAICS 72). This definition matches the definition of non-tradable industries in Mian and Sufi (2012) as closely as is possible given that the LEHD data is not broken down by 4-digit NAICS industries.4 ∗Please address correspondence to Manuel Adelino, Fuqua School of Business, 100 Fuqua Drive, Durham, NC 27708. We use 2014Q4 release. We mainly use empend, which is the number of jobs on the last day of each quarter. We use the 2000 version of the commuting-zone definition, in which the United States is covered by 709 CZs. As a robustness check, we also perform our analysis on the age-sorted commuting zone-level employment for all