12/1/2009 3:00:00 PM By
E.J. Reedy
11/30/2009 3:00:00 PM By
E.J. Reedy
11/27/2009 3:00:00 PM By
E.J. Reedy
11/27/2009 9:00:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
At the beginning of the year, I posted on data available on
college-age entrepreneurial interests. In writing that post I determined that I wanted to see something more on what the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the University of California, Los Angeles had to offer related to entrepreneurship questions. The result of this is a short paper which John Pryor and I released last week called
"Trends in Business Interest Among U.S. College Students." John did all the analysis work here but I helped to add in more context for entrepreneurship research since John doesn't have as much of an entrepreneurship research background.
11/26/2009 9:00:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The
2008 U.S. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report was released this week from Babson and Baruch Colleges. Showing significantly different trends from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics data which was included for the U.S. in the report from
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which I highlighted last week, GEM found increasing trends in "total entrepreneurial activity" in 2008.
For those of you not familiar with GEM, it is collected through a household survey in participating countries on activities related to nascent entrepreneurship - people in the process of starting a business - and people running young businesses. In that sense, GEM is probably closest in measurement concepts to the
Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity (KIEA). GEM has the advantage of explicitly asking about activities related to nascent entrepreneurship while the KIEA takes advantage of a large-scale government survey to look at transitions from being employed by someone else to being self-employed or a business owner. And while GEM reports to have a large enough sample size to disaggregate different types of growth trajectories, I don't believe it is really possible with a sample size of 2,000 for the whole United States. Perhaps if they had a sample size which was twice its current size.
It used to be that GEM was one of the first indicators to the hit the presses, making it of particular interest to the policy community since official statistics have historically been laggards. But that is no longer the case. Indeed, besides the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity and the OECD reports, I know that the Census Bureau is getting very close to releasing its updated
Business Dynamics Series through 2008 and the
NETS database has 2008 data out (I'll be posting on that more in the next couple of days). If GEM loses its timeliness factor and there continue to be concerns on the squishiness of the data it collects, then I fear the last legs of this effort might come off. It is an effort with many merits, which is why we were involved as a funder for many years - don't get me wrong. Being able to buy time on omnibus surveys can be very economical and as such I still know many researchers who utilize this function.
11/25/2009 9:00:00 AM By
Mike Horrell
Last week I viewed a Webinar by the Labor Market Information Training Institute (LMI). The subject of the presentation was Green Jobs: Definitions and Analysis, and in it, researchers in Michigan and California reviewed surveys that were being conducted in each of their respective states. The goal of conducting these surveys was to find out more about each state’s green job market. A brief snippet of the results is at the bottom, but first I discuss some points that stood out.
Before diving into the results themselves, I should note that both presenters stressed that the definition of a “green job” was not standardized when the surveys were started. Since then, standardization has apparently been worked out by the Work Force Information Council (report here), but at the time, these definitions did not exist; therefore, the California and Michigan committees came up with separate definitions of what makes a job “green.” Though the general idea of a green job is present in both definitions, without a common, specific definition, there are two important problems that arise when interpreting the results of both surveys.
First, having different definitions means that results from the California survey cannot be immediately compared to the results from the Michigan survey. Both surveys report how many green jobs exist in each state, but without a common definition of a green job, we really cannot determine which state is doing better.
Second, without specific definitions, some “green” qualifications end up seeming a little too broad. For example, in the California survey a company can qualify as having a green position if the job involves “[creating] products using natural materials.” Not only is this definition overly encompassing, but it leaves a substantial amount of wiggle room on the part of the companies filling out the survey. Without providing companies specific definitions, results get skewed as each company has to come up with their own ideas on what is “green.”
Despite these two problems, the general gist of the results can be seen, and some of the results are quite striking.
In Michigan, green jobs make up 3.4% of all private sector employment, and in California, this number is 3.3%. The surveys predict that a majority of green workers will be gathering their skills from on-the-job training as opposed to formal schooling. In addition, Michigan researchers conducting a separate analysis on a sample of green-related firms found that between 2005 and 2008, green-related firms increased their number of positions by 7.7% while over the same time period, Michigan’s private employment had a -5.4% growth rate.
As a new and necessarily innovative industry, the growth in the number of green jobs is encouraging. The high growth that green jobs have seen shows that new ventures and ideas are being pursued successfully in spite of what the larger economy is doing. Given the economic crisis, if these results are carried over at all into 2009, it would appear that Entrepreneurship in this industry is alive and well.
Furthermore, since much of the training for these jobs is informal (on-the-job), the jobs that are becoming available will be open to a large share of the labor market. As Bob Litan over at Growthology points out, while Wall Street has rebounded from the recession fairly quickly, the pace at which Main Street is recovering is quite slow. The existence of a growing industry with jobs available to a majority of Americans, such as many of these green jobs, will help America on its way to recovery.
More Results
Michigan Survey:
· 6,400 responses of 13,000 firms given the survey
· 109,000 green jobs forming 3.4% of all private employment
· 68% of future training is predicted to be conducted informally.
· In a separate analysis, researchers found that from 2005 to 2008, green-related firms increased their number of positions by 7.7%.
· In the same time period, the number of private jobs decreased by 5.4%.
California Survey: (These results are preliminary. The survey is not 100% complete.)
· 9,000 responses
· 9.2% of employers report employees working on green products and services
· 3.3% of all workers are working on green products and services.
· 60% of current training was done on-the-job.
The full Michigan report can be found here.
The slides for the California presentation are here.
Both questionnaires can be found here.
11/24/2009 5:00:00 PM By
E.J. Reedy
Update 11/24/2009: The Heritage Foundation has
posted proceedings (including video and PPTs) from the recent event I spoke at. It was a really nice event with a diverse crowd. Nice to see Brookings and Heritage coming together to focus on developing better data. I most enjoyed the mornings speakers who really offered a wide range of comments on the state of current economic statistics and needed improvements.
Original Post 11/6/2009: The Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation are hosting an event on
"Measuring Innovation and Change During Turbulent Economic Times" on November 17, 2009, 9:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. The topics on the agenda go much beyond just innovation measurement into many different aspects of change so it will be interesting to see how it all comes together at the event. Oh, and I will be serving as a discussant for one of the sessions so if you want to say hi, you will catch me at Heritage for this event.
11/24/2009 9:00:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
I have enjoyed watching reactions to Josh Lerner's new book -
Boulevard of Broken Dreams - over the last few weeks from the
Economist, the
New York Times, and also
state-level development groups. Lerner's book, which is a part of a
new Kauffman series at Princeton University Press, and flows in large part from his experience running the
Entrepreneurship Working Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research, is an easy read, in my opinion, but one which is likely to simultaneously scare and excite policymakers. Excitement will come from having something which is so comprehensive in its global policy review, but one does get scared at reading the many things which appear can go wrong with usually well-intentioned interventions. For those not having read the book, the
SSTI has a nice summary of key points.
For me, Josh's book highlights two things related to measurement:
- Knowing What to Measure is Hard. In most cases, the items which Josh highlights as keys to success or failure are not things which I would have initially thought to measure about a specific intervention although I think I'd have a better idea what to measure about a venture capital-focused policy. Since I am not trying to do such an assessment currently, I am focused on trying to improve data available from the federal agencies so that granular and consistent data on things like business dynamics, gazelle companies, and high-growth firms are available at the regional or subregional level in the United States. Releasing such data in a timely fashion could greatly aid regional economic development.
- Database on Policy Interventions. Tracking substantive changes to program implementations such as the many that Josh describes is too often left to oral history or chance capture. I would love to see some sort of open-source development of a database of key programmatic interventions to support entrepreneurship and/or innovation over time and major timelines, events, changes, etc. Such data would aid so much in looking for impacts but to my knowledge, no such compilation exists for scholars interested in studying policy to draw from (or add to). If anyone has ideas of data products available here or means by which such data could be collected, I would love to hear suggestions. Perhaps its possible mine things like Wikipedia in an automated fashion for some of this info?
11/23/2009 4:00:00 PM By
E.J. Reedy
Two short courses for economic development professionals offered through Georgia Tech look to have a focus on entrepreneurship in 2010:
11/19/2009 7:53:50 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Entrepreneurship Indicators Project has a new report out of
entrepreneurship indicators which is most notable for the
timely data they have collected on firm (or in some cases establishment) entry and exit. It is clear that that entry of employer firms (those not just entering self-employment) has been negatively affected in the current downturn while business exits have increased. We'll be highlighting some of our thoughts on this report in various locations in the coming week and I'll be sure to post those. Also notable additions to country coverage (welcome Brazil, in particular!) and an increase in data gathered from third parties on inputs into entrepreneurship.