3/4/2009 12:06:00 PM By
E.J. Reedy
One of the upcoming fronts in microdata research is matched longitudinal business records and trade data. The OECD is coordinating several efforts to get countries matching this information and from what I can tell the U.S. Census Bureau is making progress in this regard. The Center for Economic Studies (CES) at the Census Bureau recently announced the addition of foreign trade data for approved projects at the Census Research Data Centers (RDCs). These data include 2006-2007 import trade, 2006-2007 export trade and 2004-2006 exporter database.
3/3/2009 9:47:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The U.S. Census Bureau has recently released a new set of tables from their 2002 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) which shows women-owned firms by metropolitan statistical area. Unfortunately for all of us (and the ability of our policy makers to have timely data for making decisions), the 2002 SBO is the most recent data available to us to look in-depth at questions of owner demographics and geography. What I find most interesting in the data is how New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago move away from the pack, but each with their own character. Houston, in particular, looks interesting to me, moving to third in the nation in women-owned employer firms although it's maybe the sixth largest metro area by population.
The SBO is a great resource for understanding entrepreneurship. I only wish it was performed more regularly and more broadly. You can read my recent thoughts on this in the proceedings of the 2008 Kauffman Data Symposium.
2/26/2009 3:02:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The U.S. Census Bureau and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development are holding a seminar on July 15 and 16, 2009, on
Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge. While there isn't much detail available on their website yet, the event looks interesting enough for me to have added as a tentative on my calendar. While some companies have jumped in to take previously unusable data and make it usable knowledge (Google comes to mind most prominently), much room remains for improvement and leverage of our existing knowledge. Most of my focus in recent years has been on finding ways to leverage the data we have collected through additional research, but the next step of translation is perhaps more important and difficult to crack.
2/23/2009 2:57:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
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
2/18/2009 10:09:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Andrew Reamer has an interesting opinion piece on the Brookings site about the continuing drama at the Census Bureau and the importance of getting leadership established sooner rather than later.
Read the full article.
2/18/2009 5:34:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
One of the few times in the life of a federal statistical program which the general public has an opportunity for input is when a notice about an upcoming change is published in the Federal Register. Such a notice has recently been placed in the Federal Register,
requesting comments and suggestions regarding North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) revisions for 2012.
The Kauffman Foundation is trying to utilize opportunities for Federal Register comments on data collection efforts to make sure that the different perspectives of our research community are voiced on important issues. This Federal Register request regarding upcoming NAICS revisions would seem an important one for many studying entrepreneurship and innovation. If you have particular comments, we encourage you to send them directly as outlined in the link above and to forward a copy of your comments on to us. Alternatively, if you'd be interested in participating in a coordinated letter with Kauffman, please email your comments to me directly. Please feel free to forward this email on to other researchers who would have an interest in this topic.
Of particular interest to Kauffman is the request for suggestions for additions of new and emerging industries. Other sections request comments on reducing manufacturing detail and clarifying treatment of manufacturing units that outsource. Comments are due April 7. We'll be formulating our letter in March. Do you have ideas or an interest in this topic? Please add comments here or
email us.
2/7/2009 2:26:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
It's hard to know what to make of reports surfacing of a possible switch in reporting for the Census Bureau from the Commerce Department (and newly nominated Judd Gregg) to the White House. While most of the media will focus on the upcoming decenial census, I am most concerned about the implications for the business-related activities of the Census. Oversight of the Census Bureau was one of the meatier activities of the Department of Commerce so it is not a trivial activity to be taken on within the new White House. The negative commentators will see conspiracy and jerrymandering (or the like) in the switch, if it actually happens, but perhaps it is more related to the Obama administration's seemingly data-obsessed nature? Time will tell...
Read more coverage: CNBC; CNN
1/7/2009 3:08:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is used by business and government to classify and measure economic activity in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The Office of Management and Budget’s Economic Classification Policy Committee (ECPC) announced today it is soliciting proposals from the public for changes to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) structure and content to be included in a potential 2012 revision.
If you are interested in collaborating on comments about NAICS, in particular, comments about new industries, please contact me. The Kauffman Foundation along with a coalition of other partners will likely be submitting some recommendations.
1/7/2009 12:26:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
For anyone reading the morning newspaper or web feed, the recent wave of massive job cut announcements have been startling. Just this morning, Alcoa announced 15,000 job cuts. That's a number I won't soon forget.
Job creation/destruction and entrepreneurship is a key area in which the Foundation has made investments over the last five years. We are not the first to look at this area, David Birch being perhaps the most famous, but it is a topic which remains not well understood nearly thirty years after his early work. Several recent papers from some of our grantees have confirmed using different data sets the relationship between net job creation and entrepreneurship. In "Turmoil and Growth: Young Businesses, Economic Churning, and Productivity Gains," Davis, Haltiwanger, and Jarmin show new establishments play an important role in job creation and that businesses that enter and survive the initial years as a business show strong employment growth. In "Do Small Businesses Create More Jobs? Evidence from the National Establishment Time Series," Neumark, Wall, and Zhang find that small businesses create more jobs in some industries but that it is a nuanced story which they continue to examine in forthcoming working papers which are as yet unreleased.
So if new firms or young firms are big contributors to job creation in the United States, why don't we read more about that? Most of the jobs created by entrepreneurship are added one or two at a time, in an often unheralded manner. The realities of this process make it inherently opaque to coverage. With more microdata available on this topic and better aggregated tables for researchers to mine, maybe this process can become more transparent to everyone? Certainly the U.S. Census Bureau's new series on job creation and destruction by state should prove useful, as should sites like YourEconomy.org.