8/6/2009 4:09:02 PM By
E.J. Reedy
8/5/2009 11:28:02 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Youreconomy.org, a resource provided by the Edward Lowe Foundation, uses D&B-based data to provide an interactive means for people to understand businesses in their community. Now in version 2.0, it is a site worth checking out. From conversations with the Lowe Foundation, it seems they will also soon be releasing additional options meant to serve the research community. But more on those details when they become reality. More on their recent updates:
In July 2009 YourEconomy.org (YE) was updated using the 2008 NETS database release. We also developed and introduced two new components to YE, Industry and Rankings. And, there is a new statistical area we designated as the UP (Upper Peninsula) located in Michigan.
YE data is built by tracking individual establishments according to their DUNS number. DUNS numbers start with establishments as they open and stays with them as they grow, contract, move, and even close. Businesses are contacted each year by Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) and asked to report changes in activity, employment and revenue.
Each time we update YE with new NETS data it adds a new year of data and changes the data across the entire timeline not just the most recent year.
Time Warp
The 2008 NETS release uses information from several 2008 D&B databases to better track and confirm changes that happened to establishments in 2007. This process of looking forward a year is combined with a process that looks back across several years to adjust establishment information that may have changed or has been discovered recently. These back and forth adjustments, (we affectionately call this Time Warp), provide a much more complete picture of establishment changes from the beginning of the YE data (1993) through the end of 2007.
Data Years
YE took the opportunity at this update to adjust the data so it more accurately reflect the actual calendar year reported rather than the date of the NETS release version being used. For example, when you see the label for 2007 in our charts it refers to data for the full year of 2007, rather than the data represented by the NETS 2007 release.
8/4/2009 12:39:24 PM By
E.J. Reedy
Each year, the Office of Advocacy at the Small Business Administration helps to support the tabulation of Census Bureau data by firm size under the title " Statistics of U.S. Businesses and Nonemployer Statistics" or more typically SUSB. While a couple of years dated, these statistics still come in handy quite often. From their 2006 update email...
The Census Bureau has released 2005-2006 updates to the Statistics of U.S. Businesses, produced with partial funding from the Office of Advocacy. The newly added data include business openings/closings and job creation/destruction by industry and geographic location. One new component of this release is establishment births and closures by county. Some these data series go back as far as 1989, allowing users to see how small businesses are affected by the business cycle. See the dynamic data sections of http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/data.html for details.
6/2/2009 12:59:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
6/1/2009 1:20:00 PM By
E.J. Reedy
From Interesting Bearing Notes, an email newletter from the World Bank with a smattering of interesting updates and opportunities to disseminate information:
Former IBN editor Thorsten Beck and our own Asli Demirguc-Kunt have recently updated and expanded the Financial Development and Structure Database, which provides statistics on the size, activity, efficiency and stability of banks, nonbanks, equity markets, and bond markets across countries and through time. Newly added indicators include measures of banking structure and financial globalization. In their paper “Financial institutions and markets across countries and over time - data and analysis,” which introduces the revised data base, they also use the data to analyze financial system trends across the globe. Thorsten and Asli find that financial systems have deepened over the past decades along many dimensions. However, this is only true in high-income countries. Similarly, cross-border lending and bond issues have increased, but again only among high-income countries. Low and lower-middle income countries, on the other hand, have benefitted from higher remittance flows. Although the data ends in 2007, thus preventing the authors from fully capturing the recent global financial crisis, they clearly see the boom period leading up to the crisis reflected in the data. Banks’ net interest margins decreased, pushing banks to diversify income sources, while profitability increased. At the same time, the z-score, a measure of stability, decreased and hit a historic low in 2007.
More information at http://go.worldbank.org/DV96ZAS8R0.
5/31/2009 12:58:00 PM By
E.J. Reedy
I have a lot of respect for the operation Denny Dennis runs at the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB). Denny is in charge of the small business polls that NFIB releases eight times a year looking at small businesses (under 250 employees, I believe). NFIB, and I believe Denny, have been doing these continually for more than twenty years. In that time, they have covered a lot of questions which are interesting but would never get asked by most federal agencies. And in the last year they have taken the very forward-looking step of making all those survey questions available in a searchable interface which brings back both interesting survey data but also puts it in an easy to read format: 411 Small Business Facts
One of their weekly emails highlighted a recent question which I thought would have a lot of interest in the current environment:
- Was one or more of the mortgages taken out on this property to provide capital for your business?
Twenty-six (26) percent of small employers who own their residence and have a mortgage on that property had one or more of the mortgages taken out on this property to provide capital for their business (Q#18d). Eighteen (18) percent of small employers took out one or more mortgages on their residence to provide capital for their business (Q#18d).
Read the full question and take a look at other questions.
5/26/2009 10:22:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
It's been a long week with the holiday in the U.S. meaning that I am a behind in my posting, but I wanted to offer a link to some in-process papers and soon to be book on international differences in entrepreneurship which NBER organized. In particular, I think these papers are interesting for the variety of data which the scholars used in their analyses and approaches taken to get data to be more defensible by other mainstream academics. The Lusardi and Ardagna paper is a great example of how the authors took some fairly heterogeneous data in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and parsed it down to the most robust subset for the questions they were asking.
5/20/2009 10:47:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
“With globalization, more and more markets are heading closer to perfect competition models,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with Gabriel Consulting. “This means that companies have to get smarter about how they use their data and find previously unseen opportunities.”
This is an interesting quote (sounds like it came out of an entrepreneurship theory article) from a NY Times article on a new IBM product for looking at large batches of data in real-time, System S. Isn't the dream in data analysis to have lots of data and be able to anaylze it immediately? Perhaps this will open up new areas of entrepreneurship research by unlocking the incrementals in the data. For innovation, I suspect this has event more potential as there is more data for analysis in coming to understanding of innovation. Read the New York Times story.
5/20/2009 7:21:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
This week the Bureau of Labor Statistics added two new data series to their umbrella data effort, the Business Employment Dynamics (BED). BED is built from records that BLS gathers from states as a part of the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. In releasing these two new series, BLS is further expanding its offerings related to births and deaths by industry and by state, as well as annual measures of gross job gains and losses at the establishment level. These are concepts which BLS has conceptualized in recent research papers:
Read more about the BLS BED augmentations.
5/11/2009 4:33:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The Office of Advocacy at the U.S. Small Business Administration released their quarterly indicators late last week. Entitled " The Economy and Small Business," these two page overviews are a helpful reference sheet although because of lack of data they usually have more on "the economy" than on "small business" or "entrepreneurship." The general picture which emerges from the statistics is not positive. Over the next couple of days, I am going to delve into a couple of these indicators in more depth to understand what components they have and what each might be telling us about the current state of the economy.
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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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