In a new report just released today, the Kauffman Foundation (with leadership from Rob Fairlie) partnered with Fortune Small Business to examine the best places to launch a company in the United States.  Growing economies, affordable workers, stable housing markets, and low crime are just some of the features that led to the top cities in the list:

1.    1. Oklahoma City
2.    2. Pittsburgh
3.    3. Raleigh
4.    4. Houston
5.    5. Hartford
6.    6. Washington, D.C.
7.    7. Charlotte
8.    8. Austin
9.    9. New York City
10.   10. Baltimore

Fortune Small Business has developed a lot of online content to supplement this release including lots of data listings which will be of interest to many. 

Although there is little doubt that households have undergone incredible changes to their spending, investment, and other activities as a result of the current recession, data on this topic are not readily available.  A new HNW/Forbes Wealth Pulse survey gives insights into a hard-to-reach population but one of great interest - high-net worth individuals.  It finds respondents who expect a recovery soon and see opportunity in the current economy to grow investments.  Interestingly, it finds many millionaires are cutting back on charitable giving (28 percent) but even more (51 percent) plan to give as much or more to charity. 

The Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF), the Federal Reserve's seminal research product in this area, is only available through 2007 (and for every three-year period before that for several cycles).  But, there is hope that in mid-2010 the Fed will have some information available on consumer finance in 2009.  What the Fed has done, to the best of my current understanding, is to refield the SCF in 2009 on the same sample that it used in 2007.  As such, they will be creating a short longitudinal panel of households which should allow for in-depth analysis of the effects of the current recession.  This was a brilliant methodological move in my estimation but one that really should be a part of the ongoing design of the program.  The next wave of the SCF will collect data on a new sample in 2010, and I believe in that wave forward, they plan to implement an intentional longitudinal design.  This should prove very useful to researchers and policymakers in this area as we can actually examine the factors which appear to drive change at the microlevel.  Incidentally, the SCF has an oversample of wealthy households (who are disproportionately households which own businesses) so some of what HNW/Forbes attempted to capture here will be possible to analyze in a more robust sample through the SCF. 

Immigrant entrepreneurs continue to be a hot topic for study (see posting from February), but recently came across a survey in Mexico that I would like to highlight.  According to the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS) website, "MxFLS is the first Mexican survey with national representation departing from a longitudinal design, tracking the Mexican population for long periods of time regardless of migration decisions with the objective of studying the dynamics of economy, demographics, epidemiology, and population migration throughout this panel study of at least, a 10-year span."  The Mexican Family Life Survey has collected two waves of data on more than eight thousand households with a ninety percent rate of recontact between 2002 and 2005.  Additionally, the survey appears to be agnostic to relocation decisions of the participating households, in particular, reporting to continue to follow households which relocate to the United States. 

I applaud the organizers of this effort for their ambition and hope that the data collected can help to shed light on immigrant entrepreneurship.  One of the common criticisms of research in this area is the inability to track previous job activities before immigration occurs and to compare that to later job activities.  Tracking people across such long distances and for such a length of time should prove very interesting indeed. 

Special thanks to a colleague, Cristina Fernandez, who helped with some research and translation on this post.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has released 2008 statistics on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by metropolitan area nearly a year ahead of previous schedules.  Just two years ago, this program was on the chopping block because of budget cuts, but today, it seems hard to fathom that this data would not be available.  The discontinuation of GDP statistics by metro area will in my estimation mark one of the low points in federal economic statistics.  Many local economic development officials desperately need more timely local data and should be pleased with this development.  The recession is having very different effects on local economies and this data helps to illuminate some of that picture.  That said, acceleration will come with some costs to accuracy.  Here is more on the methodological change from their press release:  

The 2008 American Community Survey (ACS) is now available from Census.  It includes some limiited information on occupation and work status over the last year, including self-employment. 

I have neglected to mention a couple of popular data releases from the Census Bureau in the last few months.  Unfortunately, these are not 2008 or 2009 data, which is the time period everyone really wants currently. 

• County Businss Patterns, 2007 (to the zip code level)

• Business Expenses, 2007 (Retail, Wholesale, and Services)

• Nonemployers, 2007

An article in today's Wall Street Journal highlights findings from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index that business owners come out on top of all other occupations in terms of happiness.



The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index is constructed using a thousand person daily sample in the United States.  It measures six areas:

• Life Evaluation
• Emotional Health
• Physical Health
• Healthy Behavior
• Work Environment
• Basic Access

A month or so back I did a post on the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust Employer Health Benefits Annual Survey which is a survey of employers on benefits issues.  Today, I thought I would highlight the Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey.  The most recent survey was completed in 2007 and the survey instrument and other summary reports are available online.  A specific report on small business was released last week. 

Right away, one thing which is different about the Commonwealth survey is that it is a household survey, not a business survey.  This has some major advantages when looking at this issue since health care is often a topic which is not well understood without full information on all members of a household.  How is entrepreneurship measured in the survey? 

So, self-employment and size of business are the two main cuts.  No business age is collected or if the people involved in the smaller businesses are actually owners or founder.

And what have the results shown?  They really tend to highlight the potential improvements for many involved in entrepreneurship if some sort of improved health insurance options can be worked out.  Currently, the self-employed and those working for smaller firms are the most likely people to report going without insurance at some point in a given year.


Read more from the source report.

It'd be great to look at an oversample of nascent entrepreneurs with this population to consider if anything new could be learned. 

The World Bank's Doing Business has published data for 2010.  This effort "investigating the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it" continues to be one of the most successful efforts to collect benchmark data and drive policy changes.  Additionally, as a recent Economist article notes, these indicators are now widely used in academic and policy research.  Also perhaps of interest is a more in-depth report from late last year on paying taxes across countries. 

I would highlight an upcoming conference that Kauffman and the World Bank are sponsoring looking entrepreneurship and growth.

This morning I read a new report called "The grey economy: How third age entrepreneurs are contributing to growth" by Ron Botham and Andrew Graves.  This project was funded by National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in the U.K.  This report is particularly interesting in that it summarizes a survey which was undertaken in the U.K. specifically to look at firms started by older entrepreneurs, as well as topics like innovative activities.  While their survey response rates were not particularly good, other aspects of the design seemed pretty robust on my first reading of their protocol.  I know there is a great deal of interest in the older entrepreneur population, as highlighted by some recent reports by Kauffman and others, and would point interested parties to this report (and the accompanying literature review).  Although this is the first survey which I can remember which stratifies to get an oversample of older entrepreneurs, I doubt it will be the last.