If you don’t happen to be directly involved in the ongoing debate over health care reform, then you might do worse than to focus your energies on the many and varied ways to give the U.S. economy another little push toward recovery. That’s one way to look at last week’s release by the National Women’s [...]

Last month, the MEJ introduced you to a compendium of research on small business finance released by the SBA Office of Advocacy and entitled, appropriately enough, Small Business in Focus: Finance. The first report was, you may recall, a general overview of the small business lending market according to loan amounts and lending institutions. That [...]

Small business owners say the economy is doing worse than it was five years ago, although there was a slight increase in the number of small firms anticipating economic growth in the next twelve months, according to the results of a newly released survey by the National Small Business Association (NSBA). The 2009 Mid-Year Economic [...]

At approximately the same time that the Census Bureau was releasing the 2007 nonemployer data, another important bit of research into nonemployer businesses was also released — this time, by The Enterprise Center at Salem State College. The study, entitled “Proprietor Employment Trends in Massachusetts and Essex County: 2001- 2006,” was commissioned by The Enterprise [...]

Last week, the SBA Office of Advocacy released a compendium of research on small businesses and access to capital, a topic very much in the forefront of small business policy makers over the last ten months. The research consists of four papers, released under the single and easy to understand title Small Business in Focus: [...]

After a single year of tepid growth in 2006, the population of U.S. firms without paid employees other than the business owner(s) came roaring back in 2007 with almost a million new firms, according to data released by the Census Bureau last week. Overall, nonemployer firms increased in number by almost 940,000, or 4.5% in [...]

Family firms that are open to outside management are more likely to engage in internationalization (i.e., export activity) than closed family firms. This unsurprising finding was the overall result of a research study released by the SBA Office of Advocacy last week. It is possible that the most interesting thing about the paper is its [...]

One of the things you hear fairly often is that piece of conventional wisdom that ‘not everyone is an entrepreneur.’ That may be true superficially but, according to the results of an interesting study out of Australia, even those who are not born entrepreneurs can be made into entrepreneurs. The paper in question is entitled [...]

The SBA Office of Advocacy released its annual report on small and microbusiness lending last week, for the data year encompassing June 2007 to June 2008. As the economy slowed through the second half of the period, small business lending overall slowed significantly. Dollar volume was up by 4%, or $26.7 billion, but that was [...]

Non-micro small wholesalers suffer decreased survival rates when the dollar appreciates, according to a study released last week by the SBA Office of Advocacy. The study, “Effects of International Competition on Small Wholesale and Retail Trade Firms,” was written by Robert Feinberg with funding from Advocacy. Building on previous work by himself and others, which [...]