After receiving his doctorate, Davis began teaching at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
In his 1996 book Job Creation and Destruction (co-authored with John Haltiwanger and Scott Schuh), he uses plant-level data from the manufacturing industry to examine how businesses and workers respond to changes in their economic environments.
[2] In a review published in the Journal of Economic Literature in 1997, David Blanchflower concluded that Job Creation and Destruction "is an important piece of work.
[3] In a review published in Economica in 1998, Jonathan Haskel noted that Job Creation and Destruction "is a definitive documentation of job creation and destruction in the United States and has already proved to be the starting point for a rich body of work.
[5][6] Davis has empirically studied the basis for the conventional view that small firms are responsible for the majority of job growth in the U.S. economy.