I just came across a recent paper from the World Bank which takes on the general issue of how someone wanting to look at assets might think about disentangling gender from such an examination.  I thought this was a really interesting topic and something I know that many struggle with in studying business ownership and wealth creation.  Many businesses are co-owned by spouses, and how does one disentagle the asset effects of this?  I am not totally sure, but I like the fact that this paper tries to draw out lessons from some field work that might apply more broadly to others interested in this topic.

• Doss, Cheryl R., Grown, Caren and Deere, Carmen Diana,Gender and Asset Ownership: A Guide to Collecting Individual-Level Data (August 1, 2008). World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series, 2008. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1260131
   

Ownership and control over assets such as land and housing provide direct and indirect benefits to individuals and households, including a secure place to live, the means of a livelihood, protection during emergencies, and collateral for credit that can be used for investment or consumption. Unfortunately, few studies - either at the micro or macro levels- examine the gender dimensions of asset ownership. This paper sets out a framework for researchers who are interested in collecting data on individual level asset ownership and analyzing the gender asset gap. It reviews best practices in existing surveys with respect to data collection on assets at both the household and individual levels, and shows how various questions on individually owned assets can be incorporated with a minimum of effort and cost into existing multi-topic household surveys, using examples of three Living Standard Measurement Study surveys: the 1998-99 Ghana survey, the 2000 Guatemala survey, and the 1997-98 Vietnam survey questionnaires. The analysis shows that it is feasible to add a minimal set of questions to enable calculation of the gender asset gap. Adding a series of extra questions will permit a more satisfactory and nuanced analysis of asset acquisition, use, disposition, and valuation - information that is critical for policies promoting gender equality, poverty reduction, and economic growth. 

The Census Bureau released some new statistics from the American Community Survey last week on immigrants.  Buried in the data is information on self-employed among non-native born individuals in the United States.  I haven't had time to pull out specifically yet for all groups.  I did, however, take notice of a couple of interesting findings related to education/occupation of some different groups, most notably this statement from their release: "U.S. residents born in India have the highest percentage of civilian-employed people working in management, professional and related occupations (69 percent). These occupations employ about 36 percent of the native civilian-employed U.S. population and 27 percent of the foreign-born."  

Additionally last week I came across a new working paper on immigrant entrepreneurs that makes use of a new data source for studying immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States, the New Immigrant Survey.  What I love about this piece is that it's the first data that I am aware of which is actually able to look at individual entrepreneur backgrounds of new immigrants in the United States and to bring in their home country job experience prior to immigration.  

• Akee, Randall, Jaeger, David A. and Tatsiramos, Konstantinos,The Persistence of Self-Employment Across Borders: New Evidence on Legal Immigrants to the United States. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1136412 

Other recent studies have tried to compare self-employment among specific immigrant populations in the United States and in their home country.

• Fairlie, Robert W. and Woodruff, Christopher M.,Mexican Entrepreneurship: A Comparison of Self-Employment in Mexico and the United States(March 2006). IZA Discussion Paper No. 2039. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=892841
   

And this study tries to look at the effect of immigrant self-employment upon native born self-employment.

• Fairlie, Robert W. and Meyer, Bruce D.,The Effect of Immigration on Native Self-Employment. NBER Working Paper No. W7561. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=217548

The Kauffman Symposiums on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Data are a multi-year series of workshops focused on the important and growing body of data collected on entrepreneurship and innovation. The 2008 Kauffman Data Symposium took place in November 2008 and brought together more than 180 representatives from statistical offices, academia, and other interested individuals to discuss specific proposals for tangible improvements to data sources. The symposium highlighted twenty-five presentations, each with a different proposal for advancing our understanding of entrepreneurship and/or innovation. The revised proposals for improvement are presented in the proceedings.

Read the proceedings.

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.