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Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Survey of Business Owners'

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Longitudinal Business Database - 26

North American Industry Classification System - 18

Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board - 16

Internal Revenue Service - 14

Bureau of Labor Statistics - 12

National Science Foundation - 12

Characteristics of Business Owners - 11

Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs - 11

Economic Census - 11

Center for Economic Studies - 10

Employer Identification Numbers - 10

Integrated Longitudinal Business Database - 10

Federal Statistical Research Data Center - 10

Business Register - 10

Business Dynamics Statistics - 9

Decennial Census - 9

American Community Survey - 8

Disclosure Review Board - 8

Kauffman Foundation - 8

Small Business Administration - 7

Kauffman Firm Survey - 7

Current Population Survey - 7

Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics - 7

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - 6

Annual Business Survey - 6

Metropolitan Statistical Area - 6

2010 Census - 6

Census Bureau Business Register - 6

National Bureau of Economic Research - 6

Federal Reserve Bank - 6

Chicago Census Research Data Center - 6

National Employer Survey - 5

Nonemployer Statistics - 5

Technical Services - 5

Social Security Number - 5

Arts, Entertainment - 4

Accommodation and Food Services - 4

National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics - 4

Protected Identification Key - 4

Social Security - 4

Retail Trade - 4

Ordinary Least Squares - 4

Agriculture, Forestry - 4

Census Numident - 4

Annual Survey of Manufactures - 4

Social Security Administration - 4

Bureau of Economic Analysis - 4

Research Data Center - 4

Health Care and Social Assistance - 3

American Economic Association - 3

Census Bureau Longitudinal Business Database - 3

Department of Homeland Security - 3

World Bank - 3

Patent and Trademark Office - 3

Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research - 3

George Mason University - 3

Special Sworn Status - 3

Federal Reserve System - 3

International Trade Research Report - 3

Pew Research Center - 3

Service Annual Survey - 3

National Academy of Sciences - 3

Linear Probability Models - 3

Management and Organizational Practices Survey - 3

Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 36


  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • Working Paper

    Exploratory Report: Annual Business Survey Ownership Diversity and Its Association with Patenting and Venture Capital Success

    October 2024

    Authors: Timothy R. Wojan

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-62

    The Annual Business Survey (ABS) as the replacement for the Survey of Business Owners (SBO) serves as the principal data source for investigating business ownership of minorities, women, and immigrants. As a combination of SBO, the innovation questions formerly collected in the Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS), and an R&D module for microbusinesses with fewer than 10 employees, ABS opens new research opportunities investigating how ownership demographics are associated with innovation. One critical issue that ABS is uniquely able to investigate is the role that diversity among ownership teams plays in facilitating innovation or intermediate innovation outcomes in R&D-performing microbusinesses. Earlier research using ABS identified both demographic and disciplinary diversity as strong correlates to new-to-market innovation. This research investigates the extent to which the various forms of diversity also impact tangible innovation related intermediate outcomes such as the awarding of patents or securing venture capital financing for R&D. The other major difference with the earlier work is the focus on R&D-performing microbusinesses that are an essential input to radical innovation through the division of innovative labor. Evidence that disciplinary and/or demographic diversity affect the likelihood of receiving a patent or securing venture capital financing by small, high-tech start-ups may have implications for higher education, affirmative action, and immigration policy.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • Working Paper

    The Transformation of Self Employment

    February 2022

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-22-03

    Over the past half-century, while self-employment has consistently accounted for around one in ten of the United States workforce, its composition has changed. Since 1970, industries with high startup capital requirements have declined from 53% of self-employment to 23%. This same time period also witnessed declines in 'hometown' local entrepreneurship and the probability of the self-employed being among top earners. Using 2016 data, we show that high startup capital requirements are linked with lower profitability at small scales. The transition away from high startup capital industries appears most closely linked to changes in small business production functions and less due to advantageous reallocation to other opportunities, growth in returns-to-scale among large businesses, or a worsening of financing conditions and debt levels.
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  • Working Paper

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

    September 2021

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-21-24

    In response to requests from policymakers for additional context for Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS) measures of the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses, we researched developing estimates by owner characteristics and rural/urban locations. Leveraging geographic coding on the Business Register, we create estimates of the effect of the pandemic on small businesses by urban and rural designations. A more challenging exercise entails linking micro-level data from the SBPS with ownership data from the Annual Business Survey (ABS) to create estimates of the effect of the pandemic on small businesses by owner race, sex, ethnicity, and veteran status. Given important differences in survey design and concerns about nonresponse bias, we face significant challenges in producing estimates for owner demographics. We discuss our attempts to meet these challenges and provide discussion about caution that must be used in interpreting the results. The estimates produced for this paper are available for download. 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.
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  • Working Paper

    Immigration and Local Business Dynamics: Evidence from U.S. Firms

    August 2021

    Authors: Parag Mahajan

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-21-18

    This paper finds that establishment entry and exit'particularly the prevention of establishment exit'drive immigrant absorption and immigrant-induced productivity increases in U.S. local industries. Using a comprehensive collection of confidential survey and administrative data from the Census Bureau, it shows that inflows of immigrantworkers lead to more establishment entry and less establishment exit in local industries. These relationships are responsible for nearly all of long-run immigrant-induced job creation, with 78 percent accounted for by exit prevention alone, leaving a minimal role for continuing establishment expansion. Furthermore, exit prevention is not uniform: immigrant inflows increase the probability of exit by establishments from low productivity firms and decrease the probability of exit by establishments from high productivity firms. As a result, the increase in establishment count is concentrated at the top of the productivity distribution. A general equilibrium model proposes a mechanism that ties immigrantworkers to high productivity firms and shows how accounting for changes to the firm productivity distribution can yield substantially larger estimates of immigrant-generated economic surplus than canonical models of labor demand.
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  • Working Paper

    Black Entrepreneurs, Job Creation, and Financial Constraints

    May 2021

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-21-11

    Black-owned businesses tend to operate with less finance and employ fewer workers than those owned by Whites. Motivated by a simple conceptual framework, we document these facts and show they are causally connected using large firm-level surveys linked to universal employer data from the Census Bureau. We find that the racial financing gap is most pronounced at start-up and tends to narrow with firm age. At any age, Black-owned firms are less likely to receive bank loans, more likely to refrain from applying because they expect denial, and more likely to report that lack of finance reduces their profitability. Yet the observable characteristics of Black entrepreneurs are similar in most respects to Whites, and in some ways - higher education, growth-oriented motivations, and involvement in the business - would seem to imply higher, not lower, demand for finance. Concerning employment, we find that Black-owned firms have on average about 12 percent fewer employees than those owned by Whites, but the difference drops when controlling for firm age and other characteristics. However, when the analysis holds financial variables constant, the results imply that equally well-financed Black-owned rms would be larger than White-owned by about seven percent. Exploiting the credit supply shock of changing assignment to Community Reinvestment Act treatment through a Regression Discontinuity Design in a firm-level panel regression framework, we find that expanded credit access raises employment 5-7 percentage points more at Black-owned businesses than White-owned firms in treated neighborhoods.
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  • Working Paper

    Whose Job Is It Anyway? Co-Ethnic Hiring in New U.S. Ventures

    March 2021

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-21-05

    We explore co-ethnic hiring among new ventures using U.S. administrative data. Co-ethnic hiring is ubiquitous among immigrant groups, averaging about 22.5% and ranging from 2% to 40%. Co-ethnic hiring grows with the size of the local ethnic workforce, greater linguistic distance to English, lower cultural/genetic similarity to U.S. natives, and in harsher policy environments for immigrants. Co ethnic hiring is remarkably persistent for ventures and for individuals. Co-ethnic hiring is associated with greater venture survival and growth when thick local ethnic employment surrounds the business. Our results are consistent with a blend of hiring due to information advantages within ethnic groups with some taste-based hiring.
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