Statistics

Small Business Economic Indicators for 2003
This report represents one of the most comprehensive documents readily available to the public from SBA’s website: it contains the latest information obtained or indirectly derived from the US Census, including data on small business by state and industry. The report makes no explicit mention of entrepreneurship, and does not make any distinction between small business owners and entrepreneurs. 

Small Business Administration General Resource
A general website linking all the economic data available from the SBA regarding small business, as well as a resource tool providing the summaries of major articles touching on the subject of small business, several coming from both SBA’s own office of advocacy and a variety of educational institutions.

National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation 
The NFIB’s Research Foundation has a variety of resources, notably it’s monthly Economic Trends newsletter, and it’s Regulatory Impact Model (RIM). The NFIB’s monthly newsletter presents an open source containing timely economic indicators relevant to small business owners, such as employment trends, prices, and compensation. The RIM is a “shock” model which uses an economic model allowing users to compare forecasts with and without a particular policy change, thereby allowing researchers to better predict the effect of current or potential government policy on small business. Note, however, that these available resources focus solely on small business and give no specific nod to entrepreneurship.

National Bureau of Economic Research
A list of the most recent papers compiled by the National Bureau of Economic Research, these papers compiled independently by scholars at external academic institutions are a notable source research on the subject of entrepreneurship. Three papers in particular to take note of:

• William M. Gentry, R. Glenn Hubbard
  NBER Working Paper No. w10551
  Issued in June 2004 
  ---- Abstract -----
  Interest in the role of entrepreneurial entry in innovation raises the question of the extent to which tax policy encourages or discourages entry. We find that, while the level of the marginal tax rate has a negative effect in entrepreneurial entry, the progressivity of the tax also discourages entrepreneurship, and significantly so for some groups of households. These effects are principally traceable to the upside' or success' convexity of the household tax schedule. Prospective entrants from a priori innovative industries and occupations are no less affected by the considerations we examine than other prospective entrants. In terms of destination-based industry and occupation measures of innovative entrepreneurs, we find mixed evidence on whether innovative entrepreneurs differ from the general population; the results for entrepreneurs moving to innovative industries suggest that they may be unaffected by tax convexity but the possible endogeneity of this measure of innovative entrepreneurs confounds interpreting this specification. Using education as a measure of potential for innovation, we find that tax convexity discourages entry into self-employment for people of all educational backgrounds. Overall, we find little evidence that the tax effects are focused simply on the employment changes of less skilled or less promising potential entrants.

• Murat Iyigun, Dani Rodrik
  NBER Working Paper No. w10455
  Issued in April 2004
  ---- Abstract -----
  We analyze the interplay of policy reform and entrepreneurship in a model where investment decisions and policy outcomes are both subject to uncertainty. The production costs of non-traditional activities are unknown and can only be discovered by entrepreneurs who make sunk investments. The policy maker has access to two strategies: policy tinkering,' which corresponds to a new draw from a pre-existing policy regime, and institutional reform,' which corresponds to a draw from a different regime and imposes an adjustment cost on incumbent firms. Tinkering and institutional reform both have their respective advantages. Institutional reforms work best in settings where entrepreneurial activity is weak, while it is likely to produce disappointing outcomes where the cost discovery process is vibrant. We present cross-country evidence that strongly supports such a conditional relationship.

• Edward P. Lazear
  NBER Working Paper No. w9109
  Issued in August 2002 
  ---- Abstract -----
  “The theory proposed below is that entrepreneurs are jacks-of-all-trades who may not excel in any one skill, but are competent in many. A coherent model of the choice to become an entrepreneur is presented. The primary implication is that individuals with balanced skills should be more likely than others to become entrepreneurs. The model provides implications for the proportion of entrepreneurs by occupation, by income and yields a number of predictions for the distribution of income by entrepreneurial status. Using a data set of Stanford alumni, the predictions are tested and found to hold. In particular, by far the most important determinant of entrepreneurship is having background in a large number of different roles. Further, income distribution predictions, e.g., that there are a disproportionate number of entrepreneurs in the upper tail of the distribution, are borne out”

• Denis Gromb, David Scharfstein
  NBER Working Paper No. w9001
  Issued in June 2002 
  ---- Abstract -----
  “This paper compares the financing of new ventures in start-ups (entrepreneurship) and in established firms (intrapreneurship). Intrapreneurship allows established firms to use information on failed intrapreneurs to redeploy them into other jobs. By contrast, failed entrepreneurs must seek other jobs in an imperfectly informed external labor market. While this external labor market leads to ex post inefficient allocations, it provides entrepreneurs with high-powered incentives ex ante. We show that two types of equilibria can arise (and sometimes coexist). In a low entrepreneurship equilibrium, the market for failed entrepreneurs is thin, making internal labor markets and intrapreneurship particularly valuable. In a high entrepreneurship equilibrium, the active labor market reduces the value of internal labor markets and encourages entrepreneurship. We also show that there can be too little or too much entrepreneurial activity. There can be too little because entrepreneurs do not take into account their positive effect on the quality of the labor market. There can be too much because a high quality labor market is bad for entrepreneurial incentives.”

• Steven J. Davis, John Haltiwanger, Scott Schuh 
  NBER Working Paper No. w4492
  Issued in October 1993 
  ---- Abstract -----
  “This paper investigates how job creation and destruction behavior varies by employer size in the U.S. manufacturing sector during the period 1972 to 1988. The paper also evaluates the empirical basis for conventional claims about the job-creating prowess of small businesses. The chief findings and conclusions fall into five categories: (1) Conventional wisdom about the job-creating prowess of small businesses rests on misleading interpretations of the data. (2) Many previous studies of the job creation process rely upon data that are not suitable for drawing inferences about the relationship between employer size and job creation. (3) Large plants and firms account for most newly-created and newly- destroyed manufacturing jobs. (4) Survival rates for new and existing manufacturing jobs increase sharply with employer size. (5) Smaller manufacturing firms and plants exhibit sharply higher gross rates of job creation but not higher net rates”

Bureau of Economic Analysis
General economic data, although not specifically concerned with small business or entrepreneurship.

Bureau of Labor Statistics
Data sets whose entrepreneurship/ small business resources focus specifically on unemployment levels and the levels of self-employment.

Census Bureau
Central resource for economic research

• Census Data on Small Business
  This feature of the Census Bureau’s site organizes the data relevant to small business, as it does for other areas of special interest. The data mirrors the sets available through SBA’s report, as the SBA uses the Census as its data source. In fact, any government agency’s data on small business or entrepreneurship can normally be traced back to the original Census pool from which it came.

Federal Statistics
Contains centralized clearinghouse for all government agencies. The statistics are easily accessible, useful for general macroeconomic research, but not detailed enough to adequately study entrepreneurship

Economics and Statistics Administration: Economic Indicators

User-friendly access to the latest data produced by US Census, although like Census presents only general data sets on small business.

U.S. Department of Labor
Statistical resource limited. Mirrors data available through Census or BLS. 

U.S. Department of Commerce
Statistical resource limited. Mirrors data available through Census or BLS.

ERC and the Cross-National Assessment
Other major research initiatives include the Entrepreneurial Research Consortium (ERC) first run out of the University of Michigan which focused on nascent entrepreneurial startups, and its extended project seen in the Cross-National Assessment on Entrepreneurship (GEM Consortium).

Entrepreneurship and Unemployment
Published on 06-May-2003
This paper examines the link between the level of entrepreneurship and the amount of unemployment. It has often been hypothesized that high levels of unemployment push individuals to take initiative an become entrepreneurs by establishing their own business, mostly because they have no better alternative. A thorough analysis demonstrates that the general predictions of the researchers are partially current, but that the data is influenced by a variety of other factors that were not considered

Federal Reserve Policy Paper
Paper examines the implications of entrepreneurial growth relative to the growth of professional human capital on the general macroeconomy at both the global and the national level.

What makes a region entrepreneurial
As opposed to discussion on what makes an entrepreneur, or its effect on the US economy, this paper analyses the qualities of regions which are most important in fostering entrepreneurship

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