6/10/2010 9:00:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The
2010 Kauffman Interagency Forum on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Data (on June 4) brought together more than 50 representatives from the federal statistical community, academia, and other interested parties to talk about upcoming changes to ways in which the federal statistical agencies will be collecting data. The level of interaction among the agencies at the Forum and real interest in overall improvements was heartening to see. We were privileged to be the conveners of this conversation but clearly the hard work of making progress on entrepreneurship and innovation measurement is underway at the agency level. The Forum was mostly meant for in-person conversations and interaction but the agencies presenting did consent for us to post their PowerPoints for those interested. Below are the presentations and a couple of highlights from my perspective of their work.
Bureau of Labor Statistics (
QCEW PPT and
NLSY PPT)
- BLS plans to release a new series of tables on age and survival of the establishment (and firm, I believe) in August 2010 as a part of the Business Employment Dynamics series. This will add to the flood of new data becoming available on cohorts of firms and should prove interesting to compare with the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics.
- Birth and Death counts, without suppressions, by detailed industry and county are in the works. The concept of county-level business data without suppression is something which should excite a lot of local researchers and economic development agencies as most county-level data has to be aggregated to a level which is frustrating for looking at specific industries.
- The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth is collecting data on their 1979 cohort related to activities in business ownership and patenting. While not available for another two years it should be rich data for researchers.
Census Bureau (
PPT)
- Updates are underway to the Business Dynamics Statistics that will bring it up to the end of 2008 and likely produce more useful tables for following cohorts of firms over time at the state level.
- Synthetic microdata will be available through the Cornell RDC in the fall for the Longitudinal Business Database. This will be interesting to watch as synthetic microdata isn't actual data but rather a data set which has been built off of real data but with crucial changes to aspects of the data to ensure confidentiality of individual responses. I think the consensus on synthetic microdata is still out but its definitely one of the emerging solutions to providing microdata access to government data in an era of increasing confidentiality concerns with putting public-use microdata files on the Internet.
- I am really excited to see that the integration of characteristics of business owners into the business data is finally on the agenda in an ongoing manner. There is so much potential for new useful public products here like women in high-tech businesses or high-growth minority businesses. Many policy interventions are aimed at underrepresented minority groups in entrepreneurship and this has the potential to finally allow for tracking of changes in this arena annually, not just every five years, which is currently the most up-to-date data available matching business and ownership characteristics.
Federal Reserve Board (
PPT)
- The Federal Reserve didn't have huge updates for the room but did talk about their impromptu panel of households from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finance who were contacted in 2009 again. Specific questions were included relating to the changes in business ownership among the panel which will help to inform some aspects of our understanding about the impact of the financial crisis on business-owning households.
National Science Foundation (
PPT)
- Anyone following NSF's innovation surveys over the last decade knows that this is a time of huge payoff for them. After much review, planning, and pain, the new Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) is finally available to the public. And while the current releases are on 2008 collections, improvements made in 2009 look very positive are likely to provide even more meaningful information.
- Quite a bit of the discussion came around what to do on measuring technology commercialization in the university space. NSF indicated a new report should be coming out soon from an external group with recommendations for them on that topic. I'll be following up with that and adding more commentary then.
- The Microbusiness Innovation Survey is very early in development but still promises to be the most exciting possible change underway in the next few years in our understanding of innovation in the U.S. NSF is showing real leadership in taking on this survey and considering what topics are most appropriate to get innovation activities in very small businesses. More expert meetings and user groups are planned for this fall into 2010.
Patent and Trademark Office(
PPT)
- Did you know that the Patent and Trademark Office now has a chief economist? Well, Stuart Graham, the first occupant of this seat, is really taking the lead in improving the data the PTO makes available from their work.
- The PTO has recently done a bulk upload of information to Google and has plans for many future transfers of patent and trademark data.
- The PTO is also actively looking at what other agencies would make sense to partner in matching PTO data into more traditional statistical agency products. The PTO isn't really a statistical office (at least yet) so I think they are smart to look at partnerships that could produce really meaningful new information.
5/26/2010 3:00:00 PM By
E.J. Reedy
Martin Kenney and Donald Patton of the University of California, Davis are making available to other researchers the "Firm Database of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs): from June 1996 through 2006, Version A." Interested scholars who would like to be emailed the data should contact Don. This was a database we featured at the 2007 Kauffman Symposium on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Data but at that time the data wasn't complete. Now, version A is done and Don and Martin have plans for several updates to the database in the coming year. So, without further adieu, here is the data base summary included with the data file:
This database is comprised of all de novo initial public offerings (IPOs) on American stock exchanges and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from June 1996 through December 2006. In assembling the set of firms to be included we initially relied on Thomson Financial Venture Expert to generate a list of all IPOs over this time period. From this list the following types of firms and filings were excluded: mutual funds, real estate investment trusts (REITs), asset acquisition or blank check companies, foreign F-1 filers, all small business (SB-2) IPOs with the exception of Internet firms, and all spin-offs and other firms that were not true de novo firms.
Every firm going public must file a prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission prior to its initial public stock offering. The IPO is a defining event in the history of any firm, and it performs two functions. First, it provides the firm with capital so that it can continue its expansion. Second, after the IPO, the stakes of both management and investors, (subject to certain lock-up delays) becomes liquid. In return, the firm must conform to the reporting and transparency requirements imposed by the SEC under the Securities Act of 1933. One of the primary objectives of the Securities Act of 1933 is to require companies making a public offering of their securities to publicly disclose relevant business and financial information about their company so that potential investors can make an informed investment decision regarding the offering. To achieve this end the 1933 Act requires companies going public to file disclosure documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the most important of which are the general form S-1 registration statement and the 424B prospectus.
This database has been constructed directly from these registration statements and prospectuses. These documents were found on the SEC's Electronic Data, Gathering and Retrieval (EDGAR) website. Up until the advent of the SEC's EDGAR system, IPO registration statements and other SEC documents were filed in paper form in officially designated locations and libraries. Beginning in the 1980s the SEC began to provide Internet access to these documents through its EDGAR program, but it wasn't until June 1996 that public firms were required to file all of their documents in this format. Therefore a complete record of all IPO documents for firms going public only begins in June 1996, and this is the starting point of this database.
5/12/2010 9:12:58 AM By
E.J. Reedy
9/9/2009 2:02:22 PM By
E.J. Reedy
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Technology Innovation Program (TIP) has posted a
call for papers to inform future programs. The
Advanced Technology Program of NIST was featured in our 2007 Kauffman Data Symposium for some of the data it had available to researchers. While this current call is pretty high-level, I wanted to highlight that NIST has a history of being open to collecting high-quality research data which also can be informative to their programs.
The call highlights the following areas of particular interest to TIP:
- An area of critical national need means an area that justifies government attention because the magnitude of the problem is large and the associated societal challenges that need to be overcome are not being addressed, but could be addressed through high-risk, high-reward research.
- A societal challenge is a problem or issue confronted by society that when not addressed could negatively affect the overall function and quality of life of the Nation, and as such, justifies government action. A societal challenge is associated with barriers preventing the successful development of solutions to the area of critical national need. TIP’s mission is to tackle the technical issues that can be addressed through high-risk, high-reward research. The results of the high-risk, high-reward research should have the potential for transformational results.
- A transformational result is a potential project outcome that enables disruptive changes over and above current methods and strategies. Transformational results have the potential to radically improve our understanding of systems and technologies, challenging the status quo of research approaches and applications.
Papers are being accepted from November 9, 2009 through September 30, 2010.
8/11/2009 10:28:06 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Alicia Robb, Denny Dennis, and I did a
Professional Development Workshop at the Academy of Management a couple of days ago. Here I am posting the slides from that workshop, which focused on data available for entrepreneurship research, along with notes from my comments at the event, which I had not put into slides.
Alicia Robb, Kauffman Foundation and University of California, Santa Cruz
Denny Dennis, NFIB
E.J. Reedy, Kauffman Foundation
Additionally, at the meeting, hard copies of the
proceedings of the 2007 Kauffman Symposium on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Data were handed out. Additional copies were requested by some but
electronic versions of each paper are available on line. The
2008 proceedings, which focused on ideas for improving data are also available.
And lastly, we highlighted a few ways in which scholars could connect with Kauffman and other scholars in this area. There is this blog,
Data Maven, for tracking data developments. On Facebook, join the
Kauffman Entrepreneurship Scholars group. Subscribe to
entrepreneurship emails from Social Science Research Network. Or participate in
Kauffman's emerging scholars programs.
2/20/2009 6:40:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
In 2008, we funded a small module of questions on the General Social Survey (GSS), one of the most used social science research databases in the world. Read the questions from the 2008 survey. We have just received a first draft of the collected data and are under some time constraint in deciding whether to fund a similar set of questions (or possibly different set of questions) for the 2010 GSS. We need your help!
The GSS is transitioning from a cross-section only design to a combined cross-sectional and panel design. In 2008 the GSS had a new cross-section with 2,023 cases and also 1,538 reinterviews with 2006 GSS respondents. The initial 1972-2008 data file with the new 2008 cross-section will be available the week of February 23, 2009. The attached file has the unweighted tabulations from the entrepreneurship variables. It shows about ten percent of their household sample reported that they were in the process of trying to start a business and about twelve percent of households reported owning one or more businesses. These questions were also fielded on the panel of 1,538 reinterviews with 2006 GSS respondents. That data will be available in a month or two.
Do you want a copy of the preliminary cross-sectional file? Unfortunately because of the stage of the process, I can't post that openly, but request for that file can be made directly to me by email.
Additionally, Tom Smith, the Principal Investigator for the GSS, has written a paper for the 2008 Kauffman Data Symposium which outlines the proposed direction for 2010 GSS questions. Read the paper. Unfortunately, when Tom wrote the paper he didn't have the data back from the 2008 GSS.
I will be reviewing and contemplating all of this over the coming months, having just received things this morning. As such, I throw it open to others to comment on this effort and whether it bears doing again as Tom proposes in his paper or some modified manner. This data has great potential for the research community but like all public-use data, that does not come without it's difficulties in identifying what to measure and how. In the case of the 2008 GSS questions, we were provided some very good input from Patricia Greene (and a few others she coordinated with) and borrowed very heavily from questions used in the Panel Study on Entrepreneurial Dynamics, but we need a wider set of input before we can determine our future direction with this project.
Read the Early Tabular Results - GSS.pdf (13.28 kb)
GSS Questions SectionE.pdf (13.04 kb)
2/20/2009 6:35:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
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.
2/20/2009 3:58:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
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.
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.