CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'entrepreneur'

The following papers contain search terms that you selected. From the papers listed below, you can navigate to the PDF, the profile page for that working paper, or see all the working papers written by an author. You can also explore tags, keywords, and authors that occur frequently within these papers.
Click here to search again

Frequently Occurring Concepts within this Search

Longitudinal Business Database - 71

North American Industry Classification System - 41

Internal Revenue Service - 37

Center for Economic Studies - 33

Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics - 32

Employer Identification Numbers - 31

Bureau of Labor Statistics - 29

Survey of Business Owners - 28

Characteristics of Business Owners - 28

National Science Foundation - 28

Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board - 24

Business Dynamics Statistics - 24

Kauffman Foundation - 23

Ordinary Least Squares - 22

Business Register - 19

Small Business Administration - 18

Census Bureau Longitudinal Business Database - 17

Federal Reserve Bank - 17

Metropolitan Statistical Area - 16

National Bureau of Economic Research - 16

Chicago Census Research Data Center - 16

Standard Industrial Classification - 15

Alfred P Sloan Foundation - 14

County Business Patterns - 14

Federal Statistical Research Data Center - 13

Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs - 13

Census Bureau Business Register - 13

Decennial Census - 13

International Trade Research Report - 13

Bureau of Economic Analysis - 12

Initial Public Offering - 12

Social Security - 12

American Community Survey - 12

Current Population Survey - 12

Federal Reserve System - 12

Kauffman Firm Survey - 11

Social Security Number - 11

Special Sworn Status - 11

Disclosure Review Board - 10

Annual Business Survey - 9

Patent and Trademark Office - 9

Economic Census - 9

Department of Homeland Security - 8

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - 8

Integrated Longitudinal Business Database - 8

Nonemployer Statistics - 8

Protected Identification Key - 8

University of Maryland - 8

Social Security Administration - 8

National Employer Survey - 7

Accommodation and Food Services - 7

Health Care and Social Assistance - 7

George Mason University - 7

W-2 - 7

Retail Trade - 7

Arts, Entertainment - 6

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation - 6

Technical Services - 6

Linear Probability Models - 6

World Bank - 6

Financial, Insurance and Real Estate Industries - 6

Census Bureau Business Dynamics Statistics - 6

Total Factor Productivity - 6

Standard Statistical Establishment List - 6

University of Chicago - 6

Business Employment Dynamics - 6

Quarterly Workforce Indicators - 6

Business Formation Statistics - 5

Core Based Statistical Area - 5

2010 Census - 5

Columbia University - 5

University of Toronto - 5

Review of Economics and Statistics - 5

Census Numident - 5

Research Data Center - 5

Board of Governors - 5

Survey of Income and Program Participation - 5

Survey of Industrial Research and Development - 4

Educational Services - 4

National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics - 4

Wholesale Trade - 4

Limited Liability Company - 4

Business Research and Development and Innovation Survey - 4

Office of Management and Budget - 4

Michigan Institute for Teaching and Research in Economics - 4

VAR - 4

Harvard Business School - 4

Quarterly Journal of Economics - 4

Journal of Political Economy - 4

Longitudinal Research Database - 4

PSID - 4

MIT Press - 4

Russell Sage Foundation - 4

Business R&D and Innovation Survey - 3

American Economic Association - 3

Securities and Exchange Commission - 3

General Accounting Office - 3

Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research - 3

European Union - 3

Department of Defense - 3

Employer Characteristics File - 3

Agriculture, Forestry - 3

American Economic Review - 3

Boston College - 3

Journal of Economic Perspectives - 3

Census of Manufactures - 3

Annual Survey of Manufactures - 3

Cobb-Douglas - 3

Securities Data Company - 3

Company Organization Survey - 3

Harvard University - 3

COMPUSTAT - 3

National Academy of Sciences - 3

Cornell University - 3

Ohio State University - 3

Center for Administrative Records Research - 3

Employment History File - 3

UC Berkeley - 3

entrepreneurship - 89

entrepreneurial - 70

venture - 58

enterprise - 36

company - 31

proprietorship - 31

employed - 30

growth - 27

investment - 25

proprietor - 24

recession - 24

corporation - 23

employ - 23

startup - 23

financial - 21

employee - 21

founder - 17

minority - 17

acquisition - 17

finance - 17

earner - 15

innovation - 15

opportunity - 15

investor - 14

earnings - 14

ownership - 14

hispanic - 14

immigrant - 14

financing - 13

business startups - 13

employment growth - 13

ethnicity - 13

wealth - 13

establishment - 13

loan - 12

workforce - 12

organizational - 12

labor - 12

sale - 12

startup firms - 12

econometric - 12

sector - 12

funding - 11

patent - 11

innovate - 11

market - 11

immigrant entrepreneurs - 10

quarterly - 10

employment entrepreneurship - 9

industrial - 9

revenue - 9

macroeconomic - 8

startups employees - 8

younger firms - 8

manufacturing - 8

prospect - 8

innovative - 8

corporate - 8

borrower - 8

lending - 8

bank - 8

asian - 8

firms grow - 8

longitudinal - 7

patenting - 7

ethnic - 7

inventory - 7

estimating - 7

gdp - 7

competitor - 7

black - 7

lender - 7

owner - 7

profitability - 7

incorporated - 6

debt - 6

disadvantaged - 6

hiring - 6

nonemployer businesses - 6

innovator - 6

metropolitan - 6

economically - 6

franchising - 6

merger - 6

recessionary - 6

endogeneity - 6

firm growth - 6

growth firms - 6

profitable - 6

owned businesses - 6

bankruptcy - 6

investing - 5

equity - 5

wholesale - 5

employees startups - 5

agency - 5

migrant - 5

native - 5

immigration - 5

invention - 5

neighborhood - 5

economist - 5

survey - 5

capital - 5

profit - 5

white - 5

trend - 5

hire - 5

borrowing - 5

tenure - 5

firms young - 5

business survival - 5

competitive - 5

characteristics businesses - 5

decline - 5

fund - 4

invest - 4

innovating - 4

technological - 4

socioeconomic - 4

rent - 4

researcher - 4

developed - 4

leverage - 4

diversification - 4

strategic - 4

black business - 4

banking - 4

business data - 4

small businesses - 4

customer - 4

retail - 4

acquirer - 4

unemployed - 4

shareholder - 4

earn - 4

filing - 4

production - 4

productivity growth - 4

growth productivity - 4

business owners - 4

franchise - 4

franchisor - 4

franchised businesses - 4

endogenous - 4

geographically - 4

asset - 3

security - 3

disclosure - 3

employment data - 3

firms employment - 3

longitudinal employer - 3

corp - 3

rural - 3

economic census - 3

population - 3

small firms - 3

restaurant - 3

mexican - 3

stock - 3

collateral - 3

occupation - 3

payroll - 3

employment dynamics - 3

partnership - 3

growth employment - 3

franchise establishments - 3

credit - 3

disparity - 3

competitiveness - 3

city - 3

subsidiary - 3

regional - 3

economic growth - 3

econometrically - 3

asian immigrants - 3

Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 111


  • Working Paper

    Dynamics of High-Growth Young Firms and the Role of Venture Capitalists

    June 2025

    Authors: Yoshiki Ando

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-25-38

    Motivated by the substantial growth and upfront investments of venture capital (VC) backed firms observed in administrative US Census data, this paper develops a firm dynamics model over the life cycle. In the model, startups choose the source of financing from VC, Angel investors, or banks, depending on their growth potential, and invest in innovation. The calibrated model explains the life-cycle dynamics of firms with different sources of financing and implies that venture capitalists' advice accounts for around 22% of the growth of VC-backed firms. A counterfactual economy without VC financing would lose aggregate consumption by around 0.4%.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Impact Investing and Worker Outcomes

    May 2025

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-25-30

    Impact investors claim to distinguish themselves from traditional venture capital and growth equity investors by also pursuing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives. Whether they successfully do so in practice is unclear. We use confidential Census Bureau microdata to assess worker outcomes across portfolio companies. Impact investors are more likely than other private equity firms to fund businesses in economically disadvantaged areas, and the performance of these companies lags behind those held by traditional private investors. We show that post-funding impact-backed firms are more likely to hire minorities, unskilled workers, and individuals with lower historical earnings, perhaps reflecting the higher representation of minorities in top positions. They also allocate wage increases more favorably to minorities and rank-and-file workers than VC-backed firms. Our results are consistent with impact investors and their portfolio companies acting according to non-pecuniary social goals and thus are not consistent with mere window dressing or cosmetic changes.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Startup Dynamics: Transitioning from Nonemployer Firms to Employer Firms, Survival, and Job Creation

    April 2025

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-25-26

    Understanding the dynamics of startup businesses' growth, exit, and survival is crucial for fostering entrepreneurship. Among the nearly 30 million registered businesses in the United States, fewer than six million have employees beyond the business owners. This research addresses the gap in understanding which companies transition to employer businesses and the mechanisms behind this process. Job creation remains a critical concern for policymakers, researchers, and advocacy groups. This study aims to illuminate the transition from non-employer businesses to employer businesses and explore job creation by new startups. Leveraging newly available microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we seek to gain deeper insights into firm survival, job creation by startups, and the transition from non-employer to employer status.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Financing, Ownership, and Performance: A Novel, Longitudinal Firm-Level Database

    December 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-73

    The Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) underpins many studies of firm-level behavior. It tracks longitudinally all employers in the nonfarm private sector but lacks information about business financing and owner characteristics. We address this shortcoming by linking LBD observations to firm-level data drawn from several large Census Bureau surveys. The resulting Longitudinal Employer, Owner, and Financing (LEOF) database contains more than 3 million observations at the firm-year level with information about start-up financing, current financing, owner demographics, ownership structure, profitability, and owner aspirations ' all linked to annual firm-level employment data since the firm hired its first employee. Using the LEOF database, we document trends in owner demographics and financing patterns and investigate how these business characteristics relate to firm-level employment outcomes.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    The Metamorphosis of Women Business Owners: A Focus on Age

    November 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-71

    Due to their growth, increasing performance, and significant contributions to the United States economy, women-owned businesses have spurred the interest of policymakers, researchers, and advocacy groups. Using various data products from the Census Bureau's Business Demographics Program, this study examines how women business ownership changes over time by age. We find that young owners experienced growth in ownership between 2012 and 2020 and that younger employer businesses were mostly owned by women under the age of 35 in 2021. We show that among women aged 45 to 54 and those aged 55 to 64 ownership rates declined 5.5% and 4.8% between 2012 and 2020, implying an acceleration in the drop out of entrepreneurship for mid to late career age groups. We also show that older owners operate most businesses in capital-intensive industries, had more prior businesses, and higher rates of selling their most recently started businesses. Finally, we find that age groups often characterized as childbearing ages found balancing work and family as key drivers of their decision to start a business.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Garage Entrepreneurs or just Self-Employed? An Investigation into Nonemployer Entrepreneurship

    October 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-61

    Nonemployers, businesses without employees, account for most businesses in the U.S. yet are poorly understood. We use restricted administrative and survey data to describe nonemployer dynamics, overall performance, and performance by demographic group. We find that eventual outcome ' migration to employer status, continuing as a nonemployer, or exit ' is closely related to receipt growth. We provide estimates of employment creation by firms that began as nonemployers and become employers (migrants), estimating that relative to all firms born in 1996, nonemployer migrants accounted for 3-17% of all net jobs in the seventh year after startup. Moreover, we find that migrants' employment creation declined by 54% for the cohorts born between 1996 to 2014. Our results are consistent with increased adjustment frictions in recent periods, and suggest accessibility to transformative entrepreneurship for everyday Americans has declined.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Starting Up AI

    March 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-09R

    Using comprehensive administrative data on business applications over the period 2004- 2023, we study business applications (ideas) and the resulting startups that aim to develop AI technologies or produce goods or services that use, integrate, or rely on AI. The annual number of new AI-related business applications is stable between 2004 and 2011, but begins to rise in 2012 with further increases from 2016 onward into the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond, with a large, discrete jump in 2023. The distribution of these applications is highly uneven across states and sectors. AI business applications have a higher likelihood of becoming employer startups compared to other applications. Moreover, businesses originating from these applications exhibit higher revenue, average wage, and labor share, but similar labor productivity and lower survival rate, compared to other businesses. While it is still early in the diffusion of AI, the rapid rise in AI business applications, combined with the better performance of resulting businesses in several key outcomes, suggests a growing contribution from AI-related business formation to business dynamism.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Are Immigrants More Innovative? Evidence from Entrepreneurs

    November 2023

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-23-56

    We evaluate the contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs to innovation in the U.S. using linked survey-administrative data on 199,000 firms with a rich set of innovation measures and other firm and owner characteristics. We find that not only are immigrants more likely than natives to own businesses, but on average their firms display more innovation activities and outcomes. Immigrant owned firms are particularly more likely to create completely new products, improve previous products, use new processes, and engage in both basic and applied R&D, and their efforts are reflected in substantially higher levels of patents and productivity. Immigrant owners are slightly less likely than natives to imitate products of others and to hire more employees. Delving into potential explanations of the immigrant-native differences, we study other characteristics of entrepreneurs, access to finance, choice of industry, immigrant self-selection, and effects of diversity. We find that the immigrant innovation advantage is robust to controlling for detailed characteristics of firms and owners, it holds in both high-tech and non-high-tech industries and, with the exception of productivity, it tends to be even stronger in firms owned by diverse immigrant-native teams and by diverse immigrants from different countries. The evidence from nearly all measures that immigrants tend to operate more innovative and productive firms, together with the higher share of business ownership by immigrants, implies large contributions to U.S. innovation and growth.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    AI Adoption in America: Who, What, and Where

    September 2023

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-23-48R

    We study the early adoption and diffusion of five AI-related technologies (automated-guided vehicles, machine learning, machine vision, natural language processing, and voice recognition) as documented in the 2018 Annual Business Survey of 850,000 firms across the United States. We find that fewer than 6% of firms used any of the AI-related technologies we measure, though most very large firms reported at least some AI use. Weighted by employment, average adoption was just over 18%. AI use in production, while varying considerably by industry, nevertheless was found in every sector of the economy and clustered with emerging technologies such as cloud computing and robotics. Among dynamic young firms, AI use was highest alongside more educated, more-experienced, and younger owners, including owners motivated by bringing new ideas to market or helping the community. AI adoption was also more common alongside indicators of high-growth entrepreneurship, including venture capital funding, recent product and process innovation, and growth-oriented business strategies. Early adoption was far from evenly distributed: a handful of 'superstar' cities and emerging hubs led startups' adoption of AI. These patterns of early AI use foreshadow economic and social impacts far beyond this limited initial diffusion, with the possibility of a growing 'AI divide' if early patterns persist.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    The Local Origins of Business Formation

    July 2023

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-23-34

    What locations generate more business ideas, and where are ideas more likely to turn into businesses? Using comprehensive administrative data on business applications, we analyze the spatial disparity in the creation of business ideas and the formation of new employer startups from these ideas. Startups per capita exhibit enormous variation across granular units of geography. We decompose this variation into variation in ideas per capita and in their rate of transition to startups, and find that both components matter. Observable local demographic, economic, financial, and business conditions accounts for a significant fraction of the variation in startups per capita, and more so for the variation in ideas per capita than in transition rate. Income, education, age, and foreign-born share are generally strong positive correlates of both idea generation and transition. Overall, the relationship of local conditions with ideas differs from that with transition rate in magnitude, and sometimes, in sign: certain conditions (notably, the African-American share of the population) are positively associated with ideas, but negatively with transition rates. We also find a close correspondence between the actual rank of locations in terms of startups per capita and the predicted rank based only on observable local conditions ' a result useful for characterizing locations with high startup activity.
    View Full Paper PDF