Last week, the Census Bureau — which seems to have been very busy lately — released some preliminary estimates of business ownership numbers by gender and ethnicity, as well as by veteran status, from the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO). The report, descriptively entitled Preliminary Estimates of Business Ownership by Gender, Ethnicity, Race and [...]

Last month, the SBA Office of Advocacy released a new research report entitled Bank Credit, Trade Credit or No Credit: Evidence from the Surveys of Small Business Finances, written by Rebel A. Cole with funding from Advocacy. Cole undertakes this research because there is almost nothing in the literature that examines small employer businesses that [...]

The fact is that microbusiness owners who fail to worship at the Altar of Growth always seem to be subject to these kinds of value judgments by … well, by pretty much everybody.

My point here is that these are value judgments, no matter what anybody else says, and they are predicated on a certain set of assumptions.

They assume that all growth is good.

They assume that there is no such thing as “enough.”

They assume that anybody who doesn’t want to have a business in order to grow a business should not own a business. They should go find a job instead.

Last week might have been described as euphoric for me, because both the firm size class numbers for 2007 and the nonemployer numbers for 2008 were released. When does that ever happen?

And it is usually around this time that at least one person wonders what the big deal is. After all, they’re just numbers, right?

And that’s true. These releases are not contained on other people’s research reports, like most of the research I cover. They are raw data, nothing but numbers.

But these numbers, over time, show trends. Those trends matter, to both the microbusinesses they describe and the overall economy they inhabit.

Thanks to the fact that the U.S. Census Bureau is just a little busy this year, we won’t be seeing the firm size class numbers for 2007 until later this month. Almost on the heels of that release, somewhere in the middle of the demographics data from the 2007 Economic Census, the 2008 nonemployer numbers [...]

Last month, we took a look at research that examined entrepreneurship and regional economic growth, while using a data set that firmly excluded nonemployer businesses. Last week, the SBA Office of Advocacy released new research that examines entrepreneurial activity by looking at what percentage of workers in a regional Labor Market Area (LMA) is self-employed. [...]

One of the unfortunate things about the monthly jobs numbers released by the Labor Department is that they only present half the picture. That is why the quarterly Business Employment Dynamics data, which was released last week for the third quarter 2009, can be so very useful. From this latest data release we now know [...]

Economic development types, especially those in chronically depressed areas and in rural areas, will be interested to know that, according to newly released research, entrepreneurial activity is negatively impacted by the presence of large, entrenched companies within the community. So much for “smoke-stack chasing.” The research paper in question, entitled New Business Clustering in U.S. [...]

I love research because it is the tool of science, which seeks to observe the world and to measure and explain what it sees.

But, of course, science is only as useful as the degree to which it remains connected to the real world. That is the real significance behind the phrase “fact based policy.”

On the one hand, it is possible to spend a lot of time and energy studying things that don’t matter. Except, of course, why would you? What would be the point?

It’s fairly important for entrepreneurial development programs to find some way of measuring client outcomes so that they can say with confidence that what they do accomplishes good things for clients, communities and public welfare programs. That’s particularly true of SBA partner networks because they constantly have to establish to the satisfaction of Congressional appropriators [...]