Title: Monitoring Economic Trends via New Business Formation: Insights from Real-Time Administrative Records

Abstract: We present a new real-time dataset, Companies House Real-Time (CHRT), which records the daily creation and closure of companies across the entire population of UK-registered firms. This dataset offers a prompt indicator of business formation, becoming accessible months in advance of official business demographic statistics. Our analysis demonstrates that incorporation activity anticipates taxable business births and provides forward-looking signals regarding employment and output growth. Supporting this finding, a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model reveals that positive shocks to firm entry result in sustained increases in both employment and output.

Source: arXiv Generated at: 2026-06-02 00:00:00 UTC