Modules

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Industrial Patterns is organized as three modules. Each module is defined by a single empirical question and a descriptive scope. The modules do not overlap and are intended to be read independently.

An annual reference describing how operating performance behaves across scale, volatility, and capital intensity for mid-tier firms in a defined US industry. Each edition applies a fixed analytical framework — four metric families: margin behavior, labor elasticity, capital efficiency, and scale penalty — to observed operating data drawn from federal sources. Metrics are presented as distributions across the peer set with explicit interpretation boundaries.

A descriptive reference on the structural condition of US industries, anchored to the U.S. Economic Census. The current First Edition covers Building Materials. Each edition serves across the five-year census cycle. The reference describes industry structure across seven dimensions: how many firms and establishments exist and how the population is composed; how firms and establishments are distributed by size; how concentrated ownership of activity is; how the establishment population enters and exits; where activity is located; how the population is composed by legal form; and how labour is structured. Each dimension is presented as a distribution across the peer set, not a single average.

The Add-On Density Atlas maps where the universe of establishments in each peer-set NAICS code sits across the United States, and how that footprint has drifted over the trailing five years. It is the spatial complement to the Operating Benchmarks (which describe the distribution of operating outcomes) and the Industry Structure Reference (which describes the structural context). Together the three modules answer how a peer set performs, how it is structured, and where it is.