New York SBDC Research Network

From the Kauffman Foundation : Although the growth of young entrepreneurial businesses has increased it has not yet returned to pre-Recession levels, according to new research from the Kauffman Foundation. The Kauffman Index of Growth Entrepreneurship measures the growth of entrepreneurial businesses in the United States. In 2016, the index experienced the largest year-over-year increase in the last decade, according to its authors, Kauffman researchers Arnobio Morelix, E.J. Reedy, and Joshua Russell. Despite this uptick, however, entrepreneurial growth is still down compared to the levels experienced in the 1980s and 1990s.

Use the Entrepreneurship.org Resource Center to find information about all aspects of starting and growing a business. Designed with entrepreneurs, policy makers, investors, mentors and academics in mind, our resource center allows you to rate and comment on the materials posted by the community. The Kauffman entrepreneurship team bloggers brings to light various policies and initiatives to advance innovation and drive economic growth.

The Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity is a leading indicator of new business creation in the United States. Capturing new business owners in their first month of significant business activity, this measure provides the earliest documentation of new business development across the country. The percentage of the adult, non-business owner population that starts a business each month is measured using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS). In addition to this overall rate of entrepreneurial activity, separate estimates for specific demographic groups, states, and select metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) are presented. The Index provides the only national measure of business creation by specific demographic groups. New 2012 data allow for an update to previous reports, with consideration of trends in the rates of entrepreneurial activity over the seventeen-year period between 1996 and 2012. The Kauffman Index reveals important shifts in the national level of entrep

Jeff Boyce, who sits on the New York SBDC Advisory Board, forwarded a link to a new report found on the Kauffman Foundation website. It's called The Capital Structure: Decisions of New Firms . It's 20 pages long, and was generated by using data from Kauffman's Firm Survey. From its Abstract: "This paper investigates the capital structure choices that firms make in their initial year of operations . . . Contrary to many accounts of startup activity, the firms in our data rely heavily on external debt sources as bank financing, and less heavily on friends and family-based funding sources." Later in the report, "external debt sources" is defined to include local bank financing, as well as that of credit cards. There's a lot more to the report, but I invite you to read it. As Jeff mentioned in his accompanying email, "This recent Kauffman Foundation report underscores the importance of microloan funds and small business lending operations like NY