The Survey of Consumer Finance, run by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, has been a consistent source of U.S. household financial information.  While primarily used to look at savings and spending patterns (see Krugman's recent New York Times editorial highlighting the SCF release), increasingly the Federal Reserve has been studying how one might get more about small business finance from the Survey of Consumer Finance. 

• 2007 SCF data
   
• 2008 Kauffman Data Symposium paper highlighting possible directions for future SCF

We applaud the Fed for considering how the SCF might get more information on small business owners but do worry that their proposed direction will be difficult to be successful in given the existing response burden on complicated cases in the SCF.  That said, they won't know until they pretest if they can be successful.  In the longer term, we hope the Fed will consider reimplementing some effort which specifically targets small business financing.  In 2008, the Federal Reserve disctontinued the Survey on Small Business Finance.  

Federal Reserve Governor Randall Kroszner is leaving his post at the end of the January to return to academia at the University of Chicago.  Kroszner has been a champion of data infrastructure and was the keynote speaker at the National Academies release of the Understanding Business Dynamics report in 2007.  The only blemish in data at the Fed during Kroszner's tenure as a governor, although he was not directly responsible for the project, was the cancellation of the Survey of Small Business Finance.  

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