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)
4/27/2009 3:18:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
A new paper outlines some of the insights that can be learned through matching of patents and business databases as a complement to much of the Community Innovation Survey work in Europe. While I didn't find the paper to go very deeply into the issue, its pan-Nordic scope of consideration was unique to the papers that I have seen in this area.
One issue which the researchers didn't deal with in very much detail was the impact on their research of having to use Amadeus data instead of business register data for two countries. While researchers have little choice except to mix data sources, I do wonder what impacts this has on our understanding. Amadeus is becoming so heavily used in Europe, in international organizations, and even now by U.S. scholars doing cross-country work, but I would still like to understand more about its similarities and differences by country to other data sources. If anyone has references here, I'd welcome them.
4/15/2009 10:01:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
4/15/2009 6:34:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
George Mason, Clemson, and the College of Charleston are sponsoring a workshop this fall for researchers doing work around the topic of "business creation." Most of this research will come from the Panel Study on Entrepreneurial Dynamics, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, or one of the many scholarly projects that have been inspired in-part by this line of research. The conference will take place October 23-25 in Arlington, Virginia, with a deadline for scholars interested in participating of September 1, 2009.
This particular workshop has the following focus:
- Scholars analyzing longitudinal data sets on business creation will have an opportunity to meet and discuss their efforts as “works in progress” as they are developed for submission to peer review journals. Those working with panel data from Australia, Canada, China, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway,
and Sweden are encouraged to attend.
- Those designing and implementing longitudinal studies of business creation will have an opportunity to learn from the experiences of those who have already implemented such panel studies.
From conversations with some of the organizers and the language of the call, this workshop will have a heavy emphasis on helping researchers in the process of creating their own country-specific longitudinal data collection efforts to get off of the ground through peer exchange and harmonization with other efforts. Read more about the workshop.
4/10/2009 11:35:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
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.
4/2/2009 4:50:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The RICAFE conference in Europe is one that I've only been able to enjoy the proceedings from, but enjoy I have. Today they released their proceedings from the most recent conference. I wanted to point out one paper in particular which seems to overview some entrepreneurship and innovation data that looks particularly novel. Of particular note, the Survey of Innovative Businesses in Latvia looks to have deviated from some of the core activities of the Community Innovation Survey in some important ways for understanding the relationship between entrepreneurship and innovation. In particular, they appear to emphacize understanding innovation in small firms. Additionally, their survey incorporates some aspects of financing activities. They also have the added benefit of matching their data to other federal data.
"This paper uses the Survey of Innovative Businesses in Latvia (SIBiL) to study the relationship between owner’s human capital and firm level innovations. SIBiL is a novel microlevel ataset covering a wide range of innovative activities of 1251 small Latvian firms in 2007-2008. The sampling design of SIBiL is very similar to Community Innovation Survey (CIS), the ain instrument for measuring firm-level innovations in the European Union. The questionnaire and the sampling method of SIBiL are nearly identical to those of the CIS. However, SIBiL has a umber of important advantages. First, SIBiL complements CIS by focusing on small firms with
less than 50 employees. In contrast, the CIS does not cover firms with less than 10 employees. Second, SIBiL is conducted using face-to-face interviews with owners and managers of the ompanies, which is a more reliable method compared with the mailed questionnaires used by CIS. All the interviews were conducted by Latvian Facts, a professional survey firm. Third, IBiL has a substantially larger questionnaire, covering the areas of access to and the use of external financing, business strategy, and background of the owners, such as their human capital nd prior professional experience. Fourth, SIBiL specifically focuses on sectors that EuroStat lassifies as high-technology manufacturing and knowledge intensive services. About 35% of the firms in the sample operate in these sectors. Fifth, our survey data are merged with the financial and ownership data from the Business Registry."
This research protocol sounds remarkably similar to several other surveys and coordinated survey/research effforts. In particular, the theory expressed here is very similar to that behind the Kauffman Firm Survey and the research itself is sounds very close to the research protocol being used by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's coordinated microdata study which will be presenting preliminary results at the Kauffman Foundation at a meeting in June.
3/4/2009 4:32:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
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)
1/16/2009 1:22:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
As we have developed more longitudinal data sets over recent years at Kauffman (Kauffman Firm Survey, Panel Study on Entrepreneurial Dynamics, and the Integrated Longitudinal Business Database to name a few), it has become apparent that one of the areas which holds back research in entrepreneurship and innovation is not just access to data but the human capital skills of our research community in using new, increasingly complex data sets. It's something we have and continue to struggle with as to what actions we can take to help break that research bottleneck. Some of our Emerging Scholars Initiatives (Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship Program and NBER Entrepreneurship Research Bootcamp) but I have often wondered if some additional course offerings might be warranted.
That's a long-winded way of highlighting an upcoming one-day workshop being offered through the Chicago American Statistical Association at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business on longitudinal analysis. If you are aware of other upcoming courses, please send them our way.
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Developing better data is part of Kauffman's long-term strategy for advancing better research and policy on entrepreneurship and innovation. Data Maven is place you can connect with new data developments, provide us feedback on possible new projects, and contribute to the community seeking to improve entrepreneurship and innovation measurement.
E.J. Reedy is a manager in Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation. Learn more ...
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