CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Small Business Pulse Survey Estimates by Owner Characteristics and Rural/Urban Designation

September 2021

Abstract

Document Tags and Keywords

Similar Working Papers Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural network model know as Doc2Vec.

Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers. Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.

The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Small Business Pulse Survey Estimates by Owner Characteristics and Rural/Urban Designation' are listed below in order of similarity.

• Working Paper

  🔥

  
  
  High Frequency Business Dynamics in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic
  

  March 2021

  Authors: John Haltiwanger, Lucia Foster, Emin Dinlersoz, Catherine Buffington, Daniel Chapman

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-21-06

  Existing small businesses experienced very sharp declines in activity, business sentiment, and expectations early in the pandemic. While there has been some recovery since the early days of the pandemic, small businesses continued to exhibit indicators of negative growth, business sentiment, and expectations through the first week of January 2021. These findings are from a unique high frequency, real time survey of small employer businesses, the Census Bureau's Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS). Findings from the SBPS show substantial variation across sectors in the outcomes for small businesses. Small businesses in Accommodation and Food Services have been hit especially hard relative to those Finance and Insurance. However, even in Finance and Insurance small businesses exhibit indicators of negative growth, business sentiment, and expectations for all weeks from late April 2020 through the first week of 2021. While existing small businesses have fared poorly, after an initial decline, there has been a surge in new business applications based on the high frequency, real time Business Formation Statistics (BFS). Most of these applications are for likely nonemployers that are out of scope for the SBPS. However, there has also been a surge in new applications for likely employers. The surge in applications has been especially apparent in Retail Trade (and especially Non-store Retailers). We compare and contrast the patterns from these two new high frequency data products that provide novel insights into the distinct patterns of dynamics for existing small businesses relative to new business formations.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  🔥

  
  
  Measuring the Effect of COVID-19 on U.S. Small Businesses: The Small Business Pulse Survey
  

  May 2020

  Authors: Lucia Foster, Shawn Klimek, Emin Dinlersoz, Catherine Buffington, Carrie Dennis

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-20-16

  In response to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the Census Bureau developed and fielded an entirely new survey intended to measure the effect on small businesses. The Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS) will run weekly from April 26 to June 27, 2020. Results from the SBPS will be published weekly through a visualization tool with downloadable data. We describe the motivation for SBPS, summarize how the content for the survey was developed, and discuss some of the initial results from the survey. We also describe future plans for the SBPS collections and for our research using the SBPS data. Estimates from the first week of the SBPS indicate large to moderate negative effects of COVID-19 on small businesses, and yet the majority expect to return to usual level of operations within the next six months. Reflecting the Census Bureau's commitment to scientific inquiry and transparency, the micro data from the SBPS will be available to qualified researchers on approved projects in the Federal Statistical Research Data Center network.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Measuring the Impact of COVID-19 on Businesses and People: Lessons from the Census Bureau's Experience
  

  January 2021

  Authors: Lucia Foster, Catherine Buffington, Jason Fields

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-21-02

  We provide an overview of Census Bureau activities to enhance the consistency, timeliness, and relevance of our data products in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We highlight new data products designed to provide timely and granular information on the pandemic's impact: the Small Business Pulse Survey, weekly Business Formation Statistics, the Household Pulse Survey, and Community Resilience Estimates. We describe pandemic-related content introduced to existing surveys such as the Annual Business Survey and the Current Population Survey. We discuss adaptations to ensure the continuity and consistency of existing data products such as principal economic indicators and the American Community Survey.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Small Business Growth and Failure during the Great Recession: The Role of House Prices, Race & Gender
  

  November 2016

  Authors: Ron Jarmin, C.J. Krizan, Adela Luque

  Working Paper Number:

  carra-2016-08

  Using 2002-2011 data from the Longitudinal Business Database linked to the 2002 and 2007 Survey of Business Owners, this paper explores whether (through a collateral channel) the rise in home prices over the early 2000's and their subsequent fall associated with the Great Recession had differential impacts on business performance across owner race, ethnicity and gender. We find that the employment growth rate of minority-owned firms, particularly black and Hispanic-owned firms, is more sensitive to changes in house prices than is that of their nonminority-owned counterparts.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics (NES-D): Exploring Longitudinal Consistency and Sub-national Estimates
  

  December 2019

  Authors: Adela Luque, James M. Noon, Kevin Rinz, Victoria Udalova, Julia Manzella, Michaela Dillon

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-19-34

  Until recently, the quinquennial Survey of Business Owners (SBO) was the only source of information for U.S. employer and nonemployer businesses by owner demographic characteristics such as race, ethnicity, sex and veteran status. Now, however, the Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics series (NES-D) will replace the SBO's nonemployer component with reliable, and more frequent (annual) business demographic estimates with no additional respondent burden, and at lower imputation rates and costs. NES-D is not a survey; rather, it exploits existing administrative and census records to assign demographic characteristics to the universe of approximately 25 million (as of 2016) nonemployer businesses. Although only in the second year of its research phase, NES-D is rapidly moving towards production, with a planned prototype or experimental version release of 2017 nonemployer data in 2020, followed by annual releases of the series. After the first year of research, we released a working paper (Luque et al., 2019) that assessed the viability of estimating nonemployer demographics exclusively with administrative records (AR) and census data. That paper used one year of data (2015) to produce preliminary tabulations of business counts at the national level. This year we expand that research in multiple ways by: i) examining the longitudinal consistency of administrative and census records coverage, and of our AR-based demographics estimates, ii) evaluating further coverage from additional data sources, iii) exploring estimates at the sub-national level, iv) exploring estimates by industrial sector, v) examining demographics estimates of business receipts as well as of counts, and vi) implementing imputation of missing demographic values. Our current results are consistent with the main findings in Luque et al. (2019), and show that high coverage and demographic assignment rates are not the exception, but the norm. Specifically, we find that AR coverage rates are high and stable over time for each of the three years we examine, 2014-2016. We are able to identify owners for approximately 99 percent of nonemployer businesses (excluding C-corporations), 92 to 93 percent of identified nonemployer owners have no missing demographics, and only about 1 percent are missing three or more demographic characteristics in each of the three years. We also find that our demographics estimates are stable over time, with expected small annual changes that are consistent with underlying population trends in the U.S.. Due to data limitations, these results do not include C-corporations, which represent only 2 percent of nonemployer businesses and 4 percent of receipts. Without added respondent burden and at lower imputation rates and costs, NES-D will provide high-quality business demographics estimates at a higher frequency (annual vs. every 5 years) than the SBO.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  The Characteristics of Business Owners Database, 1992
  

  May 1999

  Authors: Brian Headd

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-99-08

  This report describes the Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO), 1992 microdata available to researchers at the Center for Economic Studies and the CBO survey. The Bureau of the Census has conducted the 1982, 1987, and 1992 CBOs for the U.S. Small Business Administration, the Minority Business Development Agency, and the general public. For the 1992 CBO, there were three surveys, a sole proprietor survey, an owner survey for each owner in partnerships and S corporations, and a firm survey for each partnership and S corporation. For database purposes, the owner questions on the sole proprietors survey and owner survey were merged, and the firm questions on the sole proprietors survey and firm survey were merged. The owner database has 116,589 records, and the firm survey has 78,147 records. The CBO reports on owners about their background such as owner type (race, and ethnicity), age, education, work experience, veteran status, etc. The CBO reports on firms (with and without employees) about their economic details such as industry, financing, home-based, exporting, franchising, profits, etc. In addition, the CBO was conducted in 1996 on firms in existence in 1992 allowing for some survivability analysis. The CBO over samples women and minority owners to allow researchers to more reliably study these owners. This survey is an extension of the Survey of Minority-Owned Business Enterprises (SMOBE) and Survey of Women-Owned Businesses (WOB) within the economic census. The CBO is available as a report, special tabulations, or microdata for approved researchers.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  The Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs: An Update
  

  January 2017

  Authors: Lucia Foster, Patrice Norman

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-17-46

  We provide an update on the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs (ASE), which is a relatively new Census Bureau business survey. About 290,000 employer firms in the private, non-agricultural U.S. economy are in the ASE sample. Its content is relatively constant over collections, allowing for comparability over time; however, each year there are approximately ten new questions in a changing topical module. Earlier topical modules covered innovation (2014) and management practices (2015). The topical module for reference year 2016 covers business advice and planning, finance, and regulations. The ASE is collected through a partnership of the Census Bureau with the Kauffman Foundation and the Minority Business Development Agency. Qualified researchers on approved projects may request access to the ASE micro data through the Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC) network.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  The Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs: An Introduction
  

  November 2015

  Authors: Lucia Foster, Patrice Norman

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-15-40R

  The Census Bureau continually seeks to improve its measures of the U.S. economy as part of its mission. In some cases this means expanding or updating the content of its existing surveys, expanding the use of administrative data, and/or exploring the use of privately collected data. When these options cannot provide the needed data, the Census Bureau may consider fielding a new survey to fill the gap. This paper describes one such new survey, the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs (ASE). Innovations in content, format, and process are designed to provide high-quality, timely, frequent information on the activities of one of the important drivers of economic growth: entrepreneurship. The ASE is collected through a partnership of the Census Bureau with the Kauffman Foundation and the Minority Business Development Agency. The first wave of the ASE collection started in fall of 2015 (for reference period 2014) and results will be released in summer 2016. Qualified researchers on approved projects will be able to access micro data from the ASE through the Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC) network.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  OWNER CHARACTERISTICS AND FIRM PERFORMANCE DURING THE GREAT RECESSION
  

  September 2014

  Authors: Ron Jarmin, C.J. Krizan, Adela Luque

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-14-36

  Minority owned businesses are an increasing important component of the U.S. economy, growing at twice the rate of all U.S. businesses between 2002 and 2007. However, a growing literature indicates that minority-owned businesses may have been especially impacted by the Great Recession. As house prices declined, foreclosures fell disproportionately on urban minority neighborhoods and one of the sources of credit for business owners was severely constrained. Using 2002-2011 data from the Longitudinal Business Database linked to the 2002 Survey of Business Owners, this paper adds to the literature by examining the employment growth and survival of minority and women employer businesses during the last decade, including the Great Recession. At first glance, our preliminary findings suggest that black and women-owned businesses underperform white, male-owned businesses, that Asian-owned businesses outperform other groups, and that Hispanic-owned businesses outperform non-Hispanic ones in regards to employment growth. However, when we look only at continuing firms, black-owned businesses outperform white-owned businesses in terms of employment growth. At the same time, we also find that the recession appears to have impacted black-owned and Hispanic-owned businesses more severely than their counterparts, in terms of employment growth as well as survival. This is also the case for continuing black and Hispanic-owned firms.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  The Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) Database
  

  October 1989

  Authors: Alfred R Nucci

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-89-09

  The Bureau of the Census conducted the Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) survey for the Small Business Administration and the Minority Business Development Agency in 1986. The CBO collected information from a national sample of 126,000 business owners, surveying the demographic and economic characteristics of owners and the economic performance of their firms. A major feature of the CBO is the large numbers of Hispanic, Asian and Other, Black and Women businesses, in addition to nonminority, male-owned businesses. The CBO data series also serves the broader purpose of providing data on characteristics of owners and firms in the small business population. This paper provides a report of the purpose, content, and basic procedures used for the survey and presents a preliminary discussion of the coverage and overall response.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---