7/24/2009 9:06:31 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The Office of Advocacy at the Small Business Administration is looking for research proposals for their upcoming year of reports. They do an
annual solicitation looking for research proposals on a set of specific topics, all of which are relevant to the entrepreneurship community. The deadline is approaching quickly - August 14, 2009 - so be sure to take a look soon!
5/27/2009 10:50:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
A lot goes into making a survey high-quality but also affordable. One choice that we made with the Kauffman Firm Survey to save on costs and try to achieve higher retention rates was to field a survey which used dual modes of collection - CATI or computer-assisted telephone interviewing and the internet. In doing so with our panel of nearly 5,000 businesses, we've been able to cut costs on the whole project and extend the period of data collection. In a field which desperately needs more longitudinal surveys, I think there are some lessons to be learned:
- It takes time. Initially respondents were much less likely to choose web vs. CATI because they didn't know our effort and they didn't fully trust us. With time, the response rates via the web have gone from the low thirties to the upper sixties.
- It saves money. The above mentioned transition has cut our actual cost per interview down considerably.
- It is more convenient. We've been able to make it very easy for respondents to stay in our sample, thus achieving nearly 80 percent retention rates.
These are just a few reasons why this dual mode choice has been good for Kauffman. In a new research paper studying the effect of this choice and any biases that it might cause in the sample, researchers at Mathematica find very few indications that the CATI vs. web option (or those who switch their response choices) matters at all. Perhaps the biggest possible influences of mode effects are industry and employer vs. non-employer.
4/30/2009 11:52:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), the KfW Bankengruppe and Creditreform are in their second wave of collecting data on a new panel of business start-ups in Germany. Much of their design is similar to the Kauffman Firm Survey in that it tracks brand new businesses over more than six years to look at financing, innovation, labor, and firm strategies. The group will be presenting at a
June 23/34 OECD/Kauffman event which has a large focus on survey research design and we should get more of an overview of their data.
FragebogenALL_EN.pdf (65.33 kb)
4/14/2009 10:48:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
We just finished up a research webinar on the new data available in the Kauffman Firm Survey, along with two research presentations.
- Alicia Robb - Overview of release of the third-follow-up data and new questions for the fourth follow-up data
- Robert Scott - Plastic Capital: Credit Card Debt and New Small Business Survival
- Paroma Sanyal - Specificity, Agency Costs and New Firm Financing
View the recorded webinar
4/10/2009 3:30:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Google is moving it's collaborative office tools towards being able to handle "secure data."
See related article. While we haven't seen any actualy security reports on this functionality, it could not only solve problems for many corporations but also for many scholars looking to do collaborative research but while in an environment which meets strict confidentiality rules required by international review boards and other institutional practices. Currently, we use one remote secure data provider, the
University of Chicago NORC Data Enclave, to provide remote, secure use of research data to a community of scholars for the
Kauffman Firm Survey.
4/8/2009 7:57:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The fourth year of data (covering calendar year 2007 activities) for the Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS) is now available along with an overview report. The KFS is a panel study of 4,928 businesses founded in 2004 and tracked over their early years of operation.
New questions were added this year regarding the founders’ educational background, sources of comparative advantage, predominant market for sales of the firm’s products and services, exports, internet sales, loan applications, and loan turndowns. The survey continues to also focus on the nature of new business formation activity; characteristics of the strategy, offerings, and employment patterns of new businesses; the nature of the financial and organizational arrangements of these businesses; and the characteristics of their founders. The full third follow-up questionnaire is available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1267449.
Researchers interested in learning more about data available from the fourth year of collection and other in-progress research should consider attending the April 14, 2009 KFS research webinar. A recording of the webinar will be placed online for those not able to attend.
Information about all of these items can be found on the Kauffman Firm Survey Web site.
3/16/2009 5:34:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Thursday and Friday of last week, we sponsored a workshop with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. I was not able to attend, but the topic was one of great interest to everyone now - entrepreneurial finance. While the final proceedings from the event will come out in a special issue of Journal of Money, Credit and Banking sometime next year, working paper versions of all presentations are available on the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland's website.
2/23/2009 10:49:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
As I talked about a couple of weeks ago, we are in the middle of reviewing the Kauffman Firm Survey questionnaire before going back to the field in late spring for the fifth round of survey work. Recently, we have reconsidered the need to ask a question about training that the businesses have received. In hindsight, we should have asked this from the beginning but we haven't. Now we are at the point where we need feedback about this specific question and the value it brings in being asked at this point in the overall process of this panel data collection process.
Training_question_022309.pdf (74.65 kb)