This article quantifies the role of plant construction, expansion, contraction, and closing in generating net and gross changes in U.S. manufacturing employment over the 1963-82 period. A new longitudinal data set, constructed from the plant-level observations collected in the last five Census of Manufactures, is utilized. The reallocation of employment opportunities across and within sectoral, regional, and cohort boundaries is measured. Over 70% of the turnover in employment opportunities occurs across plants within the same two-digit industry and geographic region. Systematic differences in the employment fluctuations of plants of different ages are also found.

This paper examines the patterns of postentry employment growth and failure for over 200,000 plants that entered the U. S. manufacturing sector in the 1967–1977 period. The postentry patterns of growth and failure vary significantly with observable employer characteristics. Plant failure rates decline with size and age as do the growth rates of nonfailing plants. The expected growth rate of a plant, which depends on the net effect of these two forces, declines with size for plants owned by single-plant firms but increases with size for plants owned by multiplant firms.