3/6/2009 5:31:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The Kauffman Foundation has launched a major, multi-year initiative to support research and writing on legal subjects relating to innovation and economic growth. Although the Foundation expects that much of the initial work by legal and economic scholars will be centered around traditional legal "silos" - intellectual property, antitrust, torts, contracts, and so on - we hope that eventually scholars will cross disciplines (within and outside the law) and engage in higher level or synthetic scholarship.
Read the full call for papers. Read more about the initiative.
3/5/2009 10:42:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
I have posted a lot this week on women's issues but that's just what has come through. This time, I was struck by a particular call for papers which specifically calls for papers which look at "how statistics, data collection and analytical processes are gendered and create a particular explanation of entrepreneurship." That's a really wide lens but one that I found interesting to think about. I see this relating to the other paper I highlighted thinking about how we measure assets can have a gender bias. Read the full call for papers for a special issue of The International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship.
3/5/2009 10:25:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
3/5/2009 10:02:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The C2ER or Council for Community and Economic Research is a group which has been around since the 1960s but whom I've only become connected to in the last several months. They are holding their annual conference in Kansas City with a focus on entrepreneurship and naturally that means that we will be cooperating on a couple of projects. All of that is a long way of saying, I've only recently been added to their email chain but I have to say I have been impressed. Just this week, they sent out the following email which highlights their leadership in trying to address critical data needs at the state level. I know that BEA has some hard budget choices to make but I can't believe that they are cutting a lot of these indicators on manufacturing by state and other investments. More broadly, C2ER's work shows just how important it can be to comment and provide feedback to these seemingly trivial topics.
BEA issued its final rule early last week regarding the BE-15, survey of foreign direct investment in the U.S. http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/pdf/E9-3705.pdf. The C2ER State Chapter was one of the commenting entities, providing its input last fall. C2ER coordinated comments from other stakeholders as well.
“One comment addressed the proposed deletion of an item that collects data on the number of employees engaged in research and development. The commenter highlighted the important uses of these data and urged BEA to retain the item. In response, BEA has decided to retain this item, which does not greatly add to the cost of conducting the survey and processing the results. The other three comments urged BEA to retain state-level data on manufacturing employees, gross property, plant, and equipment, and commercial property, citing the uses of these data in connection with tracking and analyzing foreign investment in individual states, planning international trade missions and economic development activities, and justifying funding for state investment promotion programs. BEA recognizes the utility and importance of these data items, but due to resource constraints, it is unable to reinstate these items at this time.”
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.
3/4/2009 9:18:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Many people who have considered applying to the National Science Foundation for funding are familiar with programs in specific discipliines, such as the Social and Behavioral Sciences, but one of the most exciting, fairly recent programs that NSF has launched is around the Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP). SciSIP has an interest in funding quality research and data infrastructure development and has funded some projects which are squarely in the innovation and entrepreneurship space such as the STARS database. Their current solicitation has a deadline of September 9, 2009, but the hard work to develop proposals should probably begin right now for those interested.
3/4/2009 4:32:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
3/3/2009 11:13:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
I just came across a recent paper from the World Bank which takes on the general issue of how someone wanting to look at assets might think about disentangling gender from such an examination. I thought this was a really interesting topic and something I know that many struggle with in studying business ownership and wealth creation. Many businesses are co-owned by spouses, and how does one disentagle the asset effects of this? I am not totally sure, but I like the fact that this paper tries to draw out lessons from some field work that might apply more broadly to others interested in this topic.
Ownership and control over assets such as land and housing provide direct and indirect benefits to individuals and households, including a secure place to live, the means of a livelihood, protection during emergencies, and collateral for credit that can be used for investment or consumption. Unfortunately, few studies - either at the micro or macro levels- examine the gender dimensions of asset ownership. This paper sets out a framework for researchers who are interested in collecting data on individual level asset ownership and analyzing the gender asset gap. It reviews best practices in existing surveys with respect to data collection on assets at both the household and individual levels, and shows how various questions on individually owned assets can be incorporated with a minimum of effort and cost into existing multi-topic household surveys, using examples of three Living Standard Measurement Study surveys: the 1998-99 Ghana survey, the 2000 Guatemala survey, and the 1997-98 Vietnam survey questionnaires. The analysis shows that it is feasible to add a minimal set of questions to enable calculation of the gender asset gap. Adding a series of extra questions will permit a more satisfactory and nuanced analysis of asset acquisition, use, disposition, and valuation - information that is critical for policies promoting gender equality, poverty reduction, and economic growth.
This is probably most applicable to those studying microfinance
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.
3/2/2009 3:20:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Immigration presents a lot difficulties for national statistical offices and the production of meaningful data because it typically involves the movement of people into or out of their jurisdictional boundaries. Today we released a report based on a survey performed by Duke University looking at immigrants to the United States who had since returned to their home countries, with a particular focus on China and India. The large sample of these immigrants and unique method of using LinkedIn are sure to produce copycat techniques moving forward.
Another study we released a couple of weeks ago had a surprisingly important component on immigrants - an entrepreneurial impact assessment of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Here, non-native students to MIT were found to have produced large economic returns for Massachussetts and the world in the companies which they went on to found. It was clear that the import of talent in the case of MIT had been an economic development boom for the state and the nation.
Lastly, the OECD recently produced what I thought was a really smart document, summarizing what we know about the global competition for talent. It's worth checking out if you have an interest in this area.
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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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