Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses: Current Knowledge and Challenges (Volume 75) (National Bureau of Economic Research Studies in Income and Wealth)

Start-ups and other entrepreneurial ventures make a significant contribution to the US economy, particularly in the tech sector, where they comprise some of the largest and most influential companies. Yet for every high-profile, high-growth company like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, many more fail. This enormous heterogeneity poses conceptual and measurement challenges for economists concerned with understanding their precise impact on economic growth. __Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses__ brings together economists and data analysts to discuss the most recent research covering three broad themes. The first chapters isolate high- and low-performing entrepreneurial ventures and analyze their roles in creating jobs and driving innovation and productivity. The next chapters turn the focus on specific challenges entrepreneurs face and how they have varied over time, including over business cycles. The final chapters explore core measurement issues, with a focus on new data projects under development that may improve our understanding of this dynamic part of the economy. The contribution of entrepreneurial businesses to economic growth is a frequently debated topic among the academic and policy-making communities and the subject of much discussion in the business and popular press. This debate stems from the enormous heterogeneity across entrepreneurs. A small share of entrepreneurs exhibit high growth and contribute substantially to job creation, innovation and productivity growth. However, the vast majority either fails or doesn’t grow. For both measurement and conceptual reasons, this heterogeneity is not well understood. Understanding this heterogeneity requires tracking the career paths of entrepreneurs including the differences in socio-economic circumstances across entrepreneurs. It also requires studying the obstacles and challenges facing entrepreneurs such as the difficulties of starting up businesses and obtaining financing. To complicate matters further entrepreneurs operate in a constantly changing economic and technological environment. This volume explores these issues from a number of different perspectives. A common theme is the need for improved economics measurement of entrepreneurial activity. Chapters in this volume take stock of our existing knowledge and data infrastructure on measuring entrepreneurial activity and offer insights and perspective on how to make improvements in the future. The chapters fit into three broad themes but with substantial overlap especially given the focus on economics measurement. The first broad theme is to explore entrepreneurial heterogeneity. The second broad theme is the challenges that entrepreneurs face and how this has varied over time including over the business cycle. The third broad theme focuses on core data and measurement issues and gaps Start-ups and other entrepreneurial ventures make a significant contribution to the US economy, particularly in the tech sector, where they comprise some of the largest and most influential companies. Yet for every start-up that becomes a high-profile, high-growth company like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, many more fail. This enormous heterogeneity poses conceptual and measurement challenges for economists concerned with understanding how new businesses affect economic growth. This volume brings together economists and data analysts to discuss the most recent research covering three broad themes. The first chapters isolate high- and low-performing entrepreneurial ventures and analyze their roles in creating jobs and driving innovation and productivity. The next chapters turn the focus on specific challenges entrepreneurs face and how they have varied over time, including over business cycles. The final chapters explore core measurement issues, with a focus on new data projects under development that may improve our understanding of this dynamic part of the economy