Micro Enterprise Research and Policy

Our 2023 Impact Report outlines the strategies and services we offered to meet this moment, and highlights what worked and what needs continued innovation to match the intended impact. We are grateful to everyone who is on this journey with us and hope the report serves as inspiration, as it is also an invitation to join us on the journey toward achieving financial prosperity for all.

The HLD effectively bridges the gap between the different eras of HMDA data collection and clarifies it for researchers, using the same census tract boundaries to organize the information. This accessible format should open new doors for investigating the historical effects of redlining and disinvestment through new, geographic alignment across multiple decades of mortgage reporting.

New data on how nonprofits are using and responding to AI How nonprofits think the 2024 election will affect their communications The nonprofit response to the changes at Twitter (now X)

This report details the steps the Treasury has taken to drive an inclusive economy, the results observed to date, and additional steps planned in 2024 and beyond.

To explore state and local procurement practices, especially within the current legal landscape, our research team conducted more than three dozen interviews with leaders and staff in government procurement, including training and technical assistance providers, disparity study consultants, legal experts, government officials across a wide range of departments, advocates, researchers, small-business owners, and others.

This paper provides new insights on how price complexity may affect markets for consumer goods. We report on two laboratory experiments that investigated the effects of price complexity on market outcomes. The experiments had human participants interact in basic markets. Across experiment sessions, the experiments varied how complex sellers were allowed to make their prices. In treatment 1, sellers could describe their price only using a single number. In treatment 2, sellers described their products using up to eight “sub-prices,” prices that added up to one total price. And, in treatment 3, sellers could use up to sixteen sub-prices. On average, we found that allowing more complex pricing led sellers to ask for higher total prices and buyers to make more mistakes (choosing higher-priced offerings). These effects translated into higher average transaction prices. Using data from our experiments to fit a model of seller behavior, we find that allowing sellers to use complex pricing disrupts the standard market equilibrium in which sellers compete for buyers by setting prices equal to their marginal cost of production. Instead, when prices are low, sellers can expect higher profits by raising both their total price and the complexity of their price.

Small businesses increasingly embrace AI and often lead in adoption and implementation. A recent BPC and Morning Consult survey revealed that many small businesses are actively adopting and testing AI tools to optimize their operations. BPC hosted roundtable conversations with small business owners, which provided additional context into how they approach AI. Small business owners emphasized that “AI levels the playing field and supercharges human tasks,” and that, “AI policy can’t be designed around big company use.”

A global analysis of previous research over the last three decades shows that women entrepreneurs face a higher rate of business loan denials and increased interest rates in loan decisions made by commercial bankers.

The U.S. Census Bureau announced the following seasonally adjusted business application and formation statistics for March 2024. The Business Application Series describe the business applications for tax IDs as indicated by applications for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) through filings of the IRS Form SS-4. The Business Formation Series describe employer business formations as indicated by the first instance of payroll tax liabilities for the corresponding business applications.

Earned wage advances (EWA) and cash advance products are small, short-term loans that are typically repaid on the consumer’s next payday either directly from a bank account or as a payroll deduction. Consumers access these products using an app on their smartphone by linking their bank accounts or by enrolling through their employer. The costs of these very short-term loans are not always transparent to consumers, who often pay fees and leave tips to access money and run the risk of unexpected overdraft fees. Workers who are already living paycheck to paycheck may frequently find themselves pulled into a cycle of reborrowing that depletes their net earnings and further erodes their financial stability. Through a mixed-methods approach, this research aims to better understand the costs and risks of using EWA and cash advances as well as their impacts on the financial lives of low- and moderate-income consumers.

The 2023 Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS) shows signs of a further waning of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on firms, as challenges closely associated with the pandemic—like supply chain issues—eased between 2022 and 2023. Measures of firm performance remained elevated well above pandemic-era lows and remained steady year-over-year but lagged prepandemic levels. 

Development finance agencies (DFAs) are tasked with providing financial services to underserved communities in order to see them grow and thrive. DFAs are defined here as community lenders including but not limited to community development financial institutions (CDFIs), credit unions, banks, private firms, finance authorities, and public agencies across both the private and non-profit sectors. Furthermore, this paper addresses issues faced by commercial lenders in the DFA space. Because no two communities are exactly alike, DFAs often differ in how they address the unique challenges to capital access that small businesses in their communities face. DFAs should consider the unique needs of their communities and borrowers while maintaining focus on responsible lending and risk management.

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 sought to address the practice of redlining – the intentional exclusion by banks of minority, immigrant and poor communities from financial services. In late 2023, new CRA regulations specifically included Native Land Areas for the first time. This paper sets a baseline for measuring access to capital by tribal communities in hope of a more just financial services landscape in Indian Country.

This brief examines the financing activity, financial performance, and efficiency and operations of Opportunity Finance Network’s member CDFIs that served as PPP lenders. These members devoted a substantial portion of their fiscal year 2021 lending activity to PPP, had higher self-sufficiency and change in net assets than non-PPP lenders, and achieved high rates of operational efficiency. In the short term, PPP provided an essential economic lifeline to businesses and communities. It may have also enhanced the enduring ability of CDFIs to advance mission impact.

This brief highlights sector dynamics that provide important context for any analysis of individual CDFIs, and shares suggestions for both the CDFI industry and investors new to the sector for how to improve understanding of CDFI financial metrics.

A new national survey of 1,015 small business owners including responses from Michigan, North Carolina, Texas and Washington has unveiled a bipartisan concern on critical insights into the challenges and perspectives surrounding healthcare costs.

Reimagine Main Street, in partnership with 14 other national business organizations, surveyed businesses about their experiences with corporate and government contracting. The results come out against a backdrop of significant Federal investments and a wave of litigation against diverse businesses, business diversity and efforts to increase contracting with diverse-owned and small businesses.

This report presents an analysis of employee benefits provision among Hispanic, Black, and White business owners. Leveraging data from the 2022 Entrepreneurship in the Population Survey Project (EPOP), the study exclusively focuses on businesses employing more than 10 individuals to delve deeper into the benefits landscape.

Many states have adopted Community Reinvestment Acts (CRAs) similar in purpose and structure to the federal Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. These state laws were developed following the passage of the federal CRA but contain differences that reflect the unique reinvestment priorities of individual states. State CRAs have also developed during, and often in response to, a substantial increase in the nonbank mortgage company share of the mortgage market. This report focuses on state CRA laws that provide an affirmative obligation for financial institutions to meet the lending, services, and/or investment needs of their communities. The states included are Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Washington, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. It summarizes the key factors of each of these laws, organizes them into ten issue groups, and identifies five findings that inform how states could consider establishing reinvestment obligations.

The case studies contained in this report are the result of a year-long process, during which the SBAN team worked with organizations from diverse neighborhoods and metropolitan regions to tell stories about effective small business anti-displacement strategies.

The State of Inclusion in the U.S. Financial System follows Aspen FSP’s report, Towards a National Strategy for Financial Inclusion, and moves from making the case for why the U.S. should have a National Strategy for Financial Inclusion to how. In this publication, we introduce U.S. policymakers to an assessment of the current state of inclusion in the U.S. financial system, and share processes, disparities, gaps and assess the overall state of inclusion.

This brief identifies opportunities to work with Black and other landlords of color to support racial economic justice efforts focused on wealth preservation and renters’ financial well-being.

Accelerator for America and the International Economic Development Council are excited to present the first segment in a two-part series exploring the needs and opportunities to drive more equitable entrepreneurship and small business growth in communities across the U.S. This first piece addresses equitable capital access, and the second will delve into the other critical elements of the entrepreneurial and small business ecosystem that are necessary to foster inclusive growth. Both parts of the series will focus on the role that mayors, local governments, and place-based philanthropies can play in addressing gaps and creating more equitable opportunities in their communities.

This brief addresses a set of critical questions that will arise as the industry puts this powerful growth strategy to work, focusing on how CDFI funders and investors should reconsider how they interpret key financial metrics related to portfolio quality, capital deployment, and earned income for CDFIs that are selling loans. For example, to more accurately assess the lending activity of CDFIs that are selling loans, we recommend that funders request and evaluate total assets under management rather than simply looking at outstanding loans held on the balance sheet or total deployment ratio.

Between Aug. 4-24, 2023, Small Business for America’s Future conducted a national survey of 1,089 small business owners to gauge their sentiment on the current economic climate and their perspectives on government budget negotiations. As Congress reconvenes, more lawmakers are acknowledging the potential of a government shutdown. 

According to the latest US Census data, there are more than 3 million Black-owned businesses in the country; 66% of these have fewer than ten employees, and 17% have no employees other than the owner. Despite making up just 3% of small businesses nationwide, Black-owned enterprises provide critical services to their communities, and they contribute substantially to both local and national economies through hundreds of billions of dollars in wages, spending, and tax revenue. However, historical and structural inequities have created significant obstacles to success for Black entrepreneurs, limiting their ability to start, grow, and scale their small businesses. This research study, with a specific focus on the experiences of established Black-owned small businesses, reveals new findings about the nuances of their successes and challenges, and lays out specific tools needed to build a truly supportive ecosystem for Black entrepreneurs.

This report offers data specifically for the association and nonprofit industries. It will help you analyze how you compare to similar organizations and provide you with insights to aid your strategic decision-making, resource allocation, and the refinement of your engagement strategies.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress created the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to stabilize businesses and their workers. Minority depository institutions (MDIs) – mission-driven lenders that serve marginalized communities – played a vital role in supporting small businesses through PPP lending. In this report, we document how MDIs outperformed non-MDI lenders in deploying PPP loans and loan dollars to minority and low-income communities.  

Survey results have shown that demand for CDFIs’ products and services has continually grown for years. In the 2019 survey, almost three-quarters of respondents said demand had increased from 2018. An even larger share (86%) foresaw demand continuing to increase in 2020. Although CDFIs’ business slowed briefly at the onset of the pandemic, the 2020 COVID-19 CDFI Survey revealed that the resulting economic environment spurred many financially underserved individuals and businesses to seek banking or lending services, and demand for CDFIs quickly regained momentum. As demand for their products and services continued to grow, CDFIs expressed wanting to offer additional products and services. In the 2021 survey, 76% of respondents said they wanted to expand their offerings but could not on a sustained basis. Limited staffing was frequently reported as a top inhibitor to growth. Lending capital was the secondary issue.

Between Aug. 4-15, 2023, Small Business for America’s Future conducted a national survey of 961 small business owners to gauge their sentiment around the economy and the Inflation Reduction Act on its one-year anniversary.

California communities have been ravaged by fires, flooding, extreme heat and paralyzing spring snowstorms. Big changes in public policy and corporate conduct are needed to solve the crisis of climate change. This report analyzes the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a public-private initiative created in 2020 to help alleviate financial pressures businesses experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlights the unexpected impacts the loan program has had on climate change. This first-of-its-kind analysis looks at all bank financing of oil, gas and coal companies under the PPP.

This report presents employee ownership as a strategy to address all three challenges with a flexible and proactive succession planning tool. We highlight the growing number of cases in which employee ownership has been successfully used to strengthen small- and medium-sized American manufacturers, including an innovative partnership the Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership (OMEP) has formed with Project Equity to offer their clients employee ownership succession planning services. By connecting these pressing challenges with this powerful solution, this report aims to equip key stakeholders to incorporate employee ownership into their toolkits to support small- and medium-sized manufacturers across the country, taking a critical step toward building quality jobs, forming resilient supply chains, and establishing sustainable business models.

Endeavor Ready 3.0: Breaking Barriers to Capital Access for Returning Citizens report outlines actions that lenders and organizations in the reentry community can take to improve outcomes in their programs and remove barriers to capital access to better serve millions of returning citizens. 

CALIFORNIA IS A CROWN JEWEL FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND INVESTMENT – The economy of California is the largest in the country, with a $3.598 trillion (GSP) as of 2022. – It is the largest subnational economy in the world. – If California were a sovereign nation, it would rank in terms of nominal GDP as the world’s fifth-largest economy, behind Germany and ahead of India.

Women represent more than half of the United States population and make significant contributions across all industries and sectors. Americans filed about 5.1 million business applications in 2022, nearly 14,000 a day, up from 3.5 million in 2019. That compares to just 29 percent of all business filings pre-pandemic. Women in particular have been the driving force behind America’s economic rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic, creating about half of new businesses for the third year in a row. Women of color, specifically Black women, have had a tremendous impact on the post-pandemic economy with the number of Black-women-owned employer businesses increasing to around 18 percent from 2017-2020, compared to a 9 percent increase in the number of women-owned businesses. According to an analysis produced by the Boston Consulting Group, if women participated equally to men as entrepreneurs, global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) could increase by approximately 3 to 6 percent, adding $2.5 to $5 trillion to the global economy.

Here we highlight several major takeaways for business formation through the first half of 2023. We focus on applications from likely employers because of their crucial role in job creation. We make most comparisons to 2019 in order to explicitly highlight how the pandemic-era economy has dramatically differed from prior trends up to 2020 when the pandemic hit, and to emphasize the staying power of the startup surge.

As the California Legislature considers updating the state’s small business paid family leave and sick day policies, a new poll shows that small businesses owners strongly support expanding family leave protections and other benefits to their employees, including increasing the amount of paid sick days that employees can take.

Well-Being in Rural California 2023 paints a picture of well-being and access to opportunity across race, place, and gender in rural California today. Using the American Human Development Index (HDI), this report presents how residents in rural California are doing on three key dimensions of well-being—a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Broken down by race and ethnicity, by gender, and by census tract, the index shows how communities are faring relative to one another and to the state and country as a whole. The report found that stark variation exists by place and by demographic group—resulting in significant inequalities across rural areas.

The California African American, Asian Pacific, and Hispanic Chambers of Commerce have partnered with Beacon Economics and the California Office of the Small Business Advocate to develop an annual report to share insights on the economic, fiscal, and social impact of the state’s diverse small business community.

The Kauffman Foundation continues to recognize, with urgency, the significance of the role new and existing businesses play in local, regional, and the national economy. This report continues our series of sharing the state of capital access for entrepreneurs highlighting the need for innovative products and models to improve capital delivery systems.

Last fall, the ICA Fund team built the 5-year plan for organization towards achieving our mission to accelerate great businesses through mentoring and investments and close the racial and gender wealth gaps. Part of our strategy for this first year of our plan has been to test the effectiveness of our integrated advising and investment model on driving wealth creation in diverse communities. We partnered with an exceptional researcher, Lucy Odgie-Turley, from OT Consulting (OTC) to conduct this research. OTC led an extensive literature review, conducted qualitative interviews with our alumni, and surveyed local and state-level business owners.

The following findings represent the most detailed available estimates of California minority-owned small businesses and their corresponding economic, fiscal, and social impacts.

The Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2022 report examines the financial lives of U.S. adults and their families. The report draws from the 10th annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, or SHED, which was conducted in October 2022. The report, downloadable data, data visualizations, and a video summarizing the survey’s findings are found here.

How do differences in bank or lending institution type shape access to credit for small businesses in poor and/or minority communities in the United States? Banking systems are populated by lenders that differ qualitatively in their organizational forms, business models and missions, and that connect—or fail to connect—to small business borrowers and local communities in divergent ways. The authors analyze data on the Paycheck Protection Program and its over 11 million loans made to businesses across the United States to trace how these differences shaped the flow of credit to poor and minority communities. The authors find substantial differences across seven lender types, both in their propensities to avoid or lend to firms in traditionally marginalized communities, and in how much they lend to poor and majority–minority communities relative to their nonpoor and majority White counterparts. From this variety within American banking, the authors identify two potential pathways for more inclusive lending.

In this paper, we share lessons in six key areas related to microloan origination, including specific practices of CDFIs that are currently originating many hundreds or thousands of microloans annually. The findings are drawn from the members of BOI’s Microfinance Impact Collaborative (MIC), which has been convening and collaborating since 2015 and whose members collectively originated 11,978 loans totaling just under $310 million in 2022. This paper follows a prior one that described the critical role that microloans — loans less than $50,000 — play in meeting the needs of Black and Latinx borrowers and the challenges that CDFIs face in scaling microlending.

Small business revenue, employment, and profitability each improved from 2021, but expectations worsened year-over-year. With the end of pandemic-related funding programs, the application rate for traditional financing rebounded to prepandemic levels.

Standing at the intersection of real estate ownership and business ownership, the real estate development industry has the potential to be a powerful engine for Black and Hispanic Americans to build wealth. This commissioned report, created by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) with Grove Impact as part of its Obsidian Ecosystem Initiative (OEI), presents the findings of first-of-its kind research on Black and Hispanic real estate developers. The report sheds light on the current state of Black and Hispanic real estate developers by identifying a representation crisis among real estate developers, a revenue gap for mid-sized Black developers, and revenue cliffs facing large Black and Hispanic developers. This report estimates the potential impact of removing the constraints on Black and Hispanic developers and recommends steps that real estate developers and their organizations, investors, public policymakers, and foundations could take to increase diversity in the real estate development industry.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and as many as a third of Americans have some type of criminal record. Upon reentry, individuals with a justice history, whom we refer to as returning citizens, face significant barriers to economic security and reintegration into their communities. Among the most formidable barriers to reentry are a disadvantaged living environment, low levels of education, mental health challenges, and stigma that excludes them from job opportunities and other resources.

The focus of this year’s report is viewing the future of the creative economy through an increasingly important lens: gaming technology. The video game industry has experienced explosive growth in recent years, and it is having an impact far beyond the gaming community in transformational ways. Gaming technology is foundational to the development of nearly all sectors, not just the creative ones, prompting both structural and operational shifts throughout the entire economy.

According to the Census Bureau’s 2021 Service Annual Survey (SAS), while overall estimated Services Total revenue for employer firms decreased 1.7% from 2019 to 2020, estimated employer firm revenue for some of the service industries supporting self-care grew from 2019 to 2020.

President Biden made a series of concrete commitments to the American people about his plan for economic recovery and renewal. This blog post reviews those commitments and progress made in the two years since they were made.

Preliminary results suggest that small businesses helped soften the economic blow of COVID-19, and they may have helped the economy innovate and adapt. Further research on the relationships between performance, business applications, startup rates, and job quits during COVID-19 could shed light on the importance of small businesses in combating and recovering from economic crises.

Now, more than ever, it is important to focus on the need for strong connections between founders and the investors looking to support them, as reflected in the visual theme of this year’s annual report: building bridges. We call on Congress, the Commission, and our partners to support small businesses and their investors, with a particular focus on underrepresented founders and their investors.

There were more Hispanic-owned businesses overall and more minority-owned businesses in various sectors in 2020 than a decade earlier, according to the Census Bureau’s 2021 Annual Business Survey (ABS).

This report tracks results from the East LA Business Connector (EL ABC), an action research project that as of October 2022 has engaged over 650 local and small businesses in East Los Angeles to better understand and meet community needs. This is a continuing work of action research, with every hour of effort directed toward actually supporting local businesses, both by connecting them with resources in the short-term and by informing policy and practice to better support a business ecosystem that is thriving, dynamic, and inclusive.

The number of U.S. Black-owned businesses grew from 2017 to 2019 in all sectors of the U.S. economy, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey (ABS). We reviewed business patterns among Black business owners, drawing on Census Bureau …

Entrepreneurship is important for job creation, innovation, and the economy. This brief provides a snapshot of various indicators related to early-stage entrepreneurial activity in California. Kauffman

In our new report, we examine the barriers low-income, BIPOC communities face in the US banking system. Based on data from nearly 900 participants in Southern California, the report looks at access to affordable banking options, trust and confidence in …

Although business ownership may not be the primary way that most individuals and families build wealth in the United States, in any capitalist economy it’s a route that cannot be ignored. Especially when the rules of that economy have been set such tha …

This paper examines shifts in the market share of banks and nonbank financial institutions in important product markets. Banks are covered by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) which requires them to serve all communities, including low- and moderate …

Advocacy’s annual State Profiles provide a snapshot of each state’s small businesses. The profiles gather the latest federal economic data into state-by-state snapshots of small business health and economic activity. This year’s profiles focus on state …

Climate change is altering the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events, disproportionately harming low- and moderate-income (LMI) communities. Small businesses and microenterprises play a critical economic role in these communities. These bus …

Entrepreneurship has historically been viewed as a pathway to economic opportunity and social mobility. While this remains true for many, more and more Americans are becoming entrepreneurs out of necessity. In Spring 2022, SaverLife, with the support o …

The 2022 Otis College Report on the Creative Economy is part of an ongoing research project, first commissioned in 2007, to better understand the size, growth, structure, and character of the creative economy in California, with an emphasis on Los Ange …

The report includes Inland Empire key statistics and trends in entrepreneurship, an inventory and assessment of the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, and direct insight from over 1,000 entrepreneurs in the region. The report aims to give a voice to t …

For this report, the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC) analyzed findings from multiple surveys of our varied constituents. First, we conducted a survey of 13 large national banks about their investments in broadband access and adoption initiative …

Broadband access has been expanding steadily, but significant gaps persist. PPIC

Food and agriculture-related businesses are often perceived as too risky for traditional lending approaches, yet CDFA research tells a different story. This report, with loan-level data from over a thousand funds nationwide, demonstrates that food syst …

Minority owned small businesses face more challenges in obtaining capital than other small businesses. As stated in the PayPal-funded report, Reducing the Racial Financial Health Gap: The Opportunity for Responsible Fintech, “Black-owned small business …

The City of LA began issuing its vending permits in 2020, yet it has only issued 165 permits to sidewalk food vendors, even though there are an estimated ten thousand eligible vendors. The report, “UNFINISHED BUSINESS: How Food Regulations Starve Sidew …

The rise of Creators and of the broader Creator Economy is the digital manifestation of the rise of creativity as a key element in our economy, society, and everyday lives. Creative Class Group

Historically, research on entrepreneurship and innovation has rarely been conducted using community-engaged methodologies – even in work that seeks to address barriers to entrepreneurship in systemically marginalized communities. We believe that including the voices of entrepreneurs in the research process may produce more nuanced and robust findings that, ultimately, can serve as the basis for programs and policies that could truly change the landscape of entrepreneurship in the United States.

In its report, the Commission calls on state government to do more to facilitate inclusive regional economic development, including by directing resources to regions that need them the most, investing in regional capacity, aligning funding and state programs to support regional development strategies, and ensuring that regions balance the goals of growth and inclusion.

The way that homeowners, lenders and policymakers use the term “property values” often implies that there is one organic, objective, correct definition of what someone’s home is worth. But that is not the case. Our cultural conception of property value …

New research from Advocacy indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic led to greater earnings losses for business owners of color than white business owners. SBA Office of Advocacy.

Data from the National Science Foundation show that small businesses that engage in R&D generate more patents per employee than larger businesses that engage in R&D. SBA Office of Advocacy

Advocacy’s annual State Profiles gather the latest federal economic data into state-by-state snapshots of small business economic activity.   SBA Office of Advocacy 

SBAF Surveys Show Childcare has a big Impact on Small Business Small Business for America

California Communities’ Broadband Needs and the Role of Financial Institutions: Findings from California Reinvestment Coalition Surveys California Reinvestment Coalition

The Entrepreneurship in the Population (EPOP) Survey is a new publicly available resource for understanding the scope of entrepreneurial activities across the United States. The EPOP Survey includes a variety of measures of entrepreneurial behavior at …

Immigrant owners consist of roughly 18 percent of business owners with employees and almost 23 percent of business owners without employees. Immigrant-owned businesses are found in every sector of the U.S. economy. Immigrants made up 36.8% of employer …

Although entrepreneurship is often touted as an arena of equal opportunity, there are major systemic barriers to realizing this ideal – one being access to capital. ICIC and LISC came together for an in-depth look at the small business financing indust …

Women-owned small businesses make up a significant proportion of all firms in the Los Angeles region with just over 20 percent of all businesses in the Los Angeles region being owned by women. And women-owned businesses are extremely diverse, with almo …

Entrepreneurship is a critical pathway to wealth-building and job creation. If Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) started and owned businesses at the same rate as White people, they would add approximately 9.5 million jobs to the US economy …

Recent trends, including the number of small employer firms and proprietors’ income, show small firms have weathered the COVID-19 shock. However, the demand for small business finance has outpaced supply, indicating that banks have not fully recognized …

This report describes the responses to the 2021 Survey of Household Economics and Decision making (SHED). The Federal Reserve Board has fielded this survey each fall since 2013 to understand the wide range of financial challenges and opportunities faci …

The relationship between small business ownership and wealth looms large in the imagination of policymakers and entrepreneurs alike. Indeed, people who own businesses are wealthier than those who do not. In 2019, the median net worth of self-employed f …

Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2021 BOARD OF GOVERNORS of the FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM Published May 2022

Through the American Rescue Plan and the equitable implementation of emergency relief programs, President Biden and Vice President Harris fostered the strongest recovery for Main Street on record. In 2021, Americans applied to start 5.4 million new bus …

The policy brief was informed by research conducted with the William Factory Small Business Incubator which is one of the longest serving incubators in America. It is based in Tacoma, Washington and caters to the needs of early and growth stage entrepreneurs.

You shouldn’t need a law degree to start the small business of your dreams. But too often, entrepreneurs struggle with local regulatory burdens, finding themselves trapped by high fees, long wait times, and complex paperwork. These burdens amount to a …

The Small Business Credit Survey 2022 Report on Employer Firms, issued today by the 12 Federal Reserve Banks, found many small businesses have not recovered to prepandemic levels, with the effects of the pandemic hitting disproportionately hard among f …

The most recent data from the BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report showed that the United States is still in the midst of an unprecedentedly tight labor market, with both the job-quitting rate and the number of job openings across …

Small businesses borrow mainly for four reasons: to start a business, purchase inventory, expand, or to strengthen the firm’s financial health. Firms choose different means of financing depending on the intended purpose.

In this paper the National Community Reinvestment Coalition presents a broad and detailed analysis of 2020 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data. Our analysis reveals how the private or conventional mortgage lending market is failing to serve econom …

This report from Harvard Business Review discusses some of the failings of business-driven revitalization programs, and argues that to truly produce real, enduring impact, we must shift away from a focus on scaling up, and instead encourage founders to …

From November 1, 2020, to December 14, 2020, NCRC conducted multi-layered matched-pair tests of 22 different financial institutions. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of socio-economic status (SES), specifically perceived education, on …

From ongoing supply chain disruptions to new fears surrounding potential impacts stemming from the Omicron variant, small business owners continue to face uncertainty about the future of their businesses. A new survey from Small Business Majority sheds …

Because business ownership has been a means for many Americans to build wealth, providing loans and grants to entrepreneurs of color has been seen by many as an important way to address the racial wealth gap. Although successfully reaching excluded entrepreneurs will require practices and competencies that meet their specific contexts, the lessons we have learned and practices that have proven successful will apply to all entrepreneurs who face barriers in accessing credit because of low levels of wealth, thin or nonexistent credit files, differences in cultural experiences and languages, discrimination, and/or the amount of credit they are seeking. This brief — the first in a series on this topic — discusses the core operational challenges that community development financial institutions (CDFIs) face in scaling their lending to entrepreneurs of color.

California, like the rest of the United States, is in the midst of multiple crises, where increasing inequality and racial inequity are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic and social impacts. After years of struggling with the high pr …

A national survey of more than 1,000 small business owners in, Small Business for America’s Future’s small business network finds that small businesses are being hurt by a lack of affordable child care, and small business owners support increases in fe …

Most U.S. business owners with no employees were U.S.-born but in some sectors and demographic groups, including Asian and Hispanic populations, more business owners were foreign-born. About 77.9% of owners of nonemployer businesses — firms that do not …

Small businesses are the beating heart of local economies and communities across the country. As mainstays of neighborhood identity, small businesses1 strengthen community pride and connections among residents. Small businesses also serve as a signific …

The COVID pandemic has been a perfect storm hitting the small and local businesses that make our neighborhoods and cities unique. It’s estimated that 200,000 more small businesses than normal shutdown in the last year, and that from February to April 2 …

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) supports small businesses through forgivable loans for payroll and other eligible costs. Early lending favored larger and rural businesses, according to GAO’s analysis of Small Business Administration (SBA) data. S …

Banking has changed considerably since the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was passed in 1977, and updates to its implementing regulation in the mid-1990s were soon outdated. In 2015 the agencies responsible for regulating banks subject to CRA require …

In 2018, equally male/female-owned businesses (EOB), businesses half owned by men and half owned by women, totaled 860,754 employer businesses, employed 7,970,121 workers, generated $1.3 trillion in annual sales receipt, and paid $280 billion in annual …

– Small Businesses are struggling to obtain key goods to operate, further financially impacting them as they recover from the pandemic – Domestic supply delays are coinciding with higher commodity prices for small businesses

There were roughly 12 million women-owned businesses in 2017.* According to the 2019 Annual Business Survey, women employer businesses numbered 1.1 million, employed 10.1 million workers, and accumulated $1.8 trillion in receipts. Women-owned firms make up 20% of all employer firms. Women remain underrepresented in every demographic group. Most women-owned firms are small. 90% of all women-owned businesses have no employees.* Over half of women employers have 1-4 employees.

As Congress debates a bipartisan infrastructure plan and a larger $3.5 trillion investment in “human infrastructure,” Small Business Majority surveyed its network to understand their views on key issues being considered such as child care and paid fami …

The KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor is an ongoing research project tracking the public’s attitudes and experiences with COVID-19 vaccinations. The most recent update, published June 30, 2021, contains important insights for business leaders that can inform workplace approaches to help end the pandemic.

Dismantling the barriers that have kept Black Americans from fully participating in the US economy could unleash a tremendous wave of growth, dynamism, and productivity. This research identifies critical gaps Black Americans face in their roles as work …

Reimagine Main Street and its partners fielded a national survey of small business owners from April 28-May 12, 2021 to provide insights into how small businesses are faring and to understand what they expect the near future to bring.

Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) loan funds face a common capitalization challenge as they seek to grow—they must raise net assets to enable the additional debt financing needed to support an expanding portfolio. Among CDFIs that focus on microlending—making small dollar loans of up to $50,000 to small businesses—the financial challenges are even greater, as the revenue earned on these small-dollar, relatively short-term loans typically does not cover the cost to originate and service them (Klein & Okagaki, 2018, 12-14). Thus, CDFI microlenders must also raise grant (subsidy) dollars to support the increase in their lending costs as their portfolio grows.

The COVID-19 pandemic was an economic shock to small firms and the effects were not easily predictable. An unprecedented number of establishments closed at least temporarily, jobs are rebounding but have not yet reached pre-pandemic levels, proprietor’s income rebounded quicky, and business bankruptcies seem unaffected so far. Financial conditions have improved and remain accommodative to economic growth. Meanwhile, financing remains reasonably tight for small businesses with subpar credit scores.

Small Business for America’s Future released a national survey of small business owners about their feelings toward the American Jobs Plan and the tax code.

An analysis of Paycheck Protection Program lending reveals stark disparities across the country. In the LA area, businesses in White neighborhoods received loans at a far higher rate than in Latinx, Black and Asian ones.

More than a year has passed since the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic sparked a nationwide economic crisis. Since March 2020, our focus has been on providing oversight of SBA’s pandemic response efforts to combat program fraud, ensuring these programs are being efficiently and effectively managed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply impacted communities of color and small busi- nesses of color, in many cases to a greater extent than their white counterparts. Prior to the pandemic, small businesses owned by people of color, in aggregate, faced greater challenges than white-owned firms The 2020 Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS) provides evidence that the pandemic exacerbated those challenges, an important finding as those businesses continue to weather the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Business ownership has the potential to be a financial bulwark, especially for business owners of color. Age 45+ business owners entered the pandemic with much stronger financial cushions than similar age employees and business owners under the age of 45. However, our analysis of survey data for small employer firms collected in late 2020 and detailed interviews with 25 business owners finds that older small business owners, and particularly business owners of color, had difficulty accessing funds to stay open and have experienced significant personal financial hardship during the pandemic. The future of these businesses—and the owners’ personal financial lives—is particularly salient, given that they are the lion’s share of small businesses.

Legacies of historical racist policies and ongoing discrimination in areas such as education, employment, and housing have barred many Californians of color from economic opportunities. As a result, Californians of color — particularly Black, Latinx, and American Indian Californians — are less likely to have high incomes and to have built enough wealth to be able to weather periods of income loss, retire comfortably, and pass on wealth to their children. These barriers have also made Californians of color more likely to have experienced health and economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. One area policymakers should consider in efforts to address these inequities is the state’s tax and revenue policies. Although these policies may appear race-neutral, they can play a significant role in either worsening existing racial and ethnic income and wealth disparities or promoting greater equity for Californians. A policy need not be explicitly racist in order to have racially inequitable outcomes.1 Because many current state tax policies privilege Californians with higher incomes and wealth, they widen existing racial inequities. Policymakers can also use tax policy as a tool to promote racial equity, both by making the tax code itself more equitable, and by raising revenue to invest in the social and economic well-being of Californians of color.

Drawing on recent research, this issue brief – co-authored by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program, the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, and the Democracy at Work Institute – makes a case for why policymakers, funders, and investors who care about racial and gender wealth equity should support employee share ownership. Informed by a roundtable discussion which brought together researchers, philanthropic leaders, investors, policy experts, and advocates, the paper provides a set of concrete policy and practice ideas to expand employee ownership and advance equity and economic justice. We hope this paper contributes to a broader collaborative effort to spread employee share ownership policies and practices that support economic recovery and lay the foundation for a more equitable and resilient economy.

HOPE and SurveyMonkey released the findings of the inaugural HOPE Minority Small Business Index survey which examines the sentiments and attitudes of aspiring and established Black business owners. Our inaugural survey, the first of its kind, demonstrates a high level of resiliency on the part of African American business owners.

Small businesses play a special role in innovation. In 2018, 37% of high-tech workers worked for small businesses. According to the Census Bureau’s data series, Innovation Measurement Initiative, the bulk of STEM-related researchers working on funded research at universities go into the private sector after completing their research, and a significant share go on to work at small businesses.

Women-owned firms made up only 19.9% of all firms that employed people in the United States in 2018 but their numbers are growing. There were 6,861 more women-owned firms in 2018 than in 2017, up 0.6% to 1.1 million, according to the Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey (ABS).

About two-thirds of business owners start their business from scratch, while less than a quarter of owners purchased the business they own. The starting method for small businesses tends to be relatively stable over time but differs based on owner demographics.

Economists have long been sounding the alarm that Black, Latinx, and female workers and small business owners are being hit the hardest with the economic fallout from the pandemic. But what’s less talked about is the record number of businesses that st …

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) analyzed the relationship between large banks that make small business loans and the number of branches those banks operate in each county in the United States.

Since 1980, the number of commercial banks has dropped from 14,400 to 4,600. Given the decrease in commercial banking options, it is important to understand the long-term trends of banking industry dynamics by size of bank, as well as the impact of small business lending on bank growth and small business success. This report finds a decline in bank dynamism with falling new bank entry rates and increasing exit rates for small banks. Additionally, the authors found that small business loans are positively associated with the growth of small banks and small business success. Read “Effects of Small Loans on Bank and Small Business Growth” to learn more.

Through its work, the Future of Work Commission identified critical challenges for California to address for work and workers. Many of the challenges for work and workers have existed for years. Here we focus on those that, if unaddressed, could persist or worsen. These challenges are informed by technological and economic trends underway in California and by anticipated future shocks and opportunities. Many of the challenges identified by the Commission have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A new issue brief from the Office of Advocacy, “The Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Small Businesses,” examines the effects of COVID-19 on small businesses using the first sets of available economic data. The economic impact of the pandemic varied from place to place, with metropolitan and coastal areas hardest hit. Additionally, some industries suffered more than others, with the largest declines in restaurant and taxi and limousine services. Disproportionate metropolitan impacts contributed to differences across demographic categories, with Black and Asian business owners suffering the most.

As the pandemic disproportionately affects small businesses and communities of color, the new administration and Congress are currently debating a range of policy responses. Yet there is a gap in available data reflecting absolute and relative experience and policy preferences of AAPI-, Black-, Hispanic- and Native-owned small businesses. Reimagine Main Street fielded a national survey of small business owners from January 7-27, 2021 to provide timely insight into issue priorities and policy preferences of samples of AAPI-, Black-, Hispanic-, and White-owned businesses.

A new national survey of small business owners sheds light on their struggles to secure financing and their views on policy solutions that could help small businesses survive and grow post-pandemic.

The National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) released its 2020 #LetsTalkBusiness Roundtable Series Report, a collection of testimonials from women entrepreneurs on current challenges and opportunities associated with access to capital, childcare, and patenting and trademark.

The publication of this report seeks to document the toll the COVID-19 pandemic took on small businesses in 2020. At the time our survey was fielded, six months into the pandemic, closures, layoffs, depressed revenue, and uncertainty continued to plague small businesses across the country. Small business debt mounted and business owners plowed their personal savings into their firms to keep them afloat.

The federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program provided forgivable loans to help businesses survive the COVID-19 economic collapse. But that wasn’t enough. About four million small businesses closed permanently in 2020, and many needed other options, like modifications to outstanding loans and credit card debt. New research from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) found that Black and Latino small business owners had less access to those options than White small business owners.

Lending to businesses in counties where a bank has no branches is highly sensitive to economic conditions. During the 2007 recession, distant lending contracted far more sharply than local lending, leaving the share of loans made at a distance lower than it had been at the beginning of the century. This study suggests that the presence of local bank branches might help small businesses weather economic downturns.

The Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics series (NES-D) provides information on the demographic characteristics of nonemployer businesses.

The Office of Advocacy’s Small Business Economic Bulletin for December examines how small businesses have been faring during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall self-employment levels have been relatively steady, but income changes from small business owners have been choppy. Additionally, the lack of recent data on business closures makes it difficult to assess the overall state of small business.

The Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS) measures the effect of changing business conditions during the Coronavirus pandemic on our nation’s small businesses. SBPS complements existing U.S. Census Bureau data collections by providing high-frequency, detailed information on the challenges small businesses are facing during the Coronavirus pandemic.

The Aspen Institute Financial Security Program has, for five years, tracked the challenges that face American households and learned from the leadership and example of our partners in the field. They have taken a step back to take stock of what leaders have learned over the past five years. The result is their new framework and an updated vision for the financial security field. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted metropolitan areas, which have seen a higher rate of small business closures than non-metropolitan areas. However, in recent weeks, the New York City metropolitan area has reopened faster than the national rate. Read “Small Business Facts: Pandemic Pressures City Businesses” to learn more.

At Core Strategy Partners we were wondering how fellow small business owners are dealing with this new normal. We set out to do what we do best; gather in-depth insights and offer ways to turn those insights into action. We spoke with small business owners across the nation about their experiences. The following pages reveal what we discovered.

Advocacy’s most requested publication, Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business, gathers the most up-to-date statistics about American small businesses in one place. Updated annually, the FAQ is a convenient place to find facts about the total number of small businesses, their share of employment and net new jobs, and their overall contribution to the U.S. economy.

Small Business Majority’s latest survey reveals that the uncertainty of whether more help will arrive has left too many small businesses on the brink of collapse. The survey finds that without additional funding, more than 1 in 3 (35%) small business owners will not survive past the next three months. The number is even higher for small business owners of color: an astounding 41% of Black and Latino-owned businesses won’t make it through the next few months without additional financial support. And 1 in 5 small business owners report they’ve considered filing for bankruptcy.

Given current market conditions, it is clear that absent major federal interventions, whole swathes of the small-business sector will never return, minority business owners will suffer more than their fair share of the burden, and entrepreneurship levels will remain depressed for a generation or more. But the collision of these forces—COVID-19, economic consolidation, and deep racial inequality—also create a window of opportunity for significant reform. This report provides a five-step roadmap towards a more inclusive, dynamic, and productive small-business sector. We break down the five steps into ten major policy recommendations. While the federal government must take the lead for many of our recommendations, we also suggest how it can galvanize the full energy of public, private and civic institutions.

This report provides preliminary findings from the Select Subcommittee’s ongoing investigation of the implementation of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) by the Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Department of the Treasury (Treasury). The report finds that contrary to Congress’s clear intent, the Trump Administration and many big banks failed to prioritize small businesses in underserved markets, including minority and women-owned businesses. As a result, small businesses that were truly in need of financial support during the economic crisis often faced longer waits and more obstacles to receiving PPP funding than larger, wealthier companies.

In 2017, the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions launched the Youth Entrepreneurship Fund, which explores entrepreneurship as a pathway to economic self-determination and wealth-building for opportunity youth. Del Norte County and Tribal Lands, California; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and San Francisco, California received YEF grants. The Aspen Forum partnered with the Aspen Institute’s Business Ownership Initiative to co-lead a community of practice among the YEF grantees and document the learnings from this work. Their new case study, “Creating Entrepreneurship Pathways for Opportunity Youth: Lessons From Del Norte and Tribal Lands, California,” explores the local context and history of the opportunity youth efforts and how entrepreneurship fits into the larger body of community-building work in Del Norte.

San Francisco Entrepreneurs of Color Fund: Creating a Continuum of Capital and Consulting The Aspen Institute First published October 2020 Structural inequities—both historical and current—have created barriers for entrepreneurs of color to build wealt …

In a new report from Urban Reform Institute edited by Joel Kotkin, J.H. Cullum Clark and Anne Snyder explore what happens when opportunity stalls. Pete Saunders and Karla Lopez del Rio tell the story of how homeownership enabled upward mobility for their respective families. Wendell Cox quantifies the connection between urban containment policies and housing affordabilty.

The Inland Empire Women’s Business Center and the Coachella Valley Women’s Center conducted a study of their clients to learn more about what helps business owners become employers, creating new jobs for the region. The study also examined the types of jobs provided by micro-businesses and the wages and benefits offered. They discovered that micro-business jobs are often close to home, are flexible to accommodate caregiving and educational pursuits and are a career path.

This report uses the latest publicly available lending data from banks to examine changes in small business credit for June 2017 through June 2019. The data used was collected prior to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and provides a precrisis benchmark on the state of small business lending.

Black owners show biggest decline in business activity. Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on business owners have varied across demographic groups. Data on demographic characteristics and self-employment are collected through the Current Population Survey and available through IPUMS. In July 2020, the total number of people who were self-employed and working was 7.3 percent lower than in July 2019. That decline was a partial recovery from April 2020, when the decline was 20.2 percent relative to April 2019. Declines have been largest for Black self-employed workers, with a decline of 37.6 percent in April and a partial recovery to a decline of 18.4 percent in July. The effects of the pandemic have varied by industry, and demographic differences in the effects of the pandemic reflect demographic differences in distributions across industries.

Women-owned small businesses have been more heavily impacted by the coronavirus pandemic than male-owned small businesses, and they are less likely to anticipate a strong recovery in the year ahead, new data show. The Special Report on Women-Owned Small Businesses During COVID-19  from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce also found that women-owned small businesses have less optimistic revenue, investment and hiring plans compared to male-owned small businesses.

Each profile focuses on the impact of small businesses in 436 congressional districts. Within, readers can find the congressional district’s total number of small employers and their industry breakout, plus the number of workers employed and payroll expended by small businesses. Additionally, the profiles provide a map showing the total number and distribution of self-employed workers across the district.

Given the financial sector’s history of systemic exclusion and discrimination, the San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment (OFE) and the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC) worked together to analyze banking relief that is currently being made available to consumers and borrowers, identify gaps and best practices, and outline recommendations for financial institutions and policymakers on how to dismantle systemic racism in banking and to reimagine relief and reforms that banks should embrace.

The COVID-19 pandemic has already had an unprecedented impact on the financial lives of households across the country. During June and July 2020, Prosperity Now conducted a national survey of lower-income households to better understand the circumstances these households are confronted with and the strategies they use to secure resources to navigate this crisis.

The effects of the pandemic on small businesses amid forced closings, modified re-openings, and weakened demand, are well documented. Black businesses experienced the most acute decline, with a 41 percent drop. This brief examines the reasons why Black firms have been almost twice as likely to shutter as small firms overall.

Since March 2020, businesses in the U.S. have been struggling to continue operations in the face of a global pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a recession because of the widespread closures of non-essential businesses enacted to reduce the spread of the virus. Even as things begin to reopen, people are less likely to go out due to possible health risks. In response, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act which created the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The PPP is a lending program that provides money, in a potential grant format, to small businesses to help them weather the economic effects of the pandemic. The majority of the loan needs to be allocated for employee salaries and then the remainder can be used for other business expenses like rent and loan payments. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the disparities in small business lending we have detected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic continued with implementation of the PPP program.

The Federal Reserve’s community development function promotes the economic resilience and mobility of low- to moderate-income and underserved households and communities across the country. The spread of COVID-19 is having an impact on communities nationwide. To best respond to this crisis, information is needed about the scope and scale of the pandemic’s challenges. Throughout 2020, all 12 Reserve Banks and the Fed Board of Governors are surveying representatives of nonprofit organizations, financial institutions, government agencies, and other community organizations to understand the effects of COVID-19 on low- to moderate-income communities and the entities serving them. The results of each survey will be released as a downloadable report.

To determine the initial effectiveness of government relief efforts, Gusto analyzed data from nearly 27,000 of our small business customers who reported receiving PPP loans and compared it to platform data from our 100,000-plus small business customers nationwide[1]. The report below shows that PPP aid has helped to provide stabilization from the initial free fall in March ‘20, with strong increases in hiring and rehiring beginning in the second half of April ‘20.

NCRC developed a new ratings system for quantitative measures on banks’ community development financing under CRA. Our suggested ratings could increase community development lending and investment between $15 billion to $28 billion annually.

This fact sheet shows that across the United States, businesses owned by Black, Latinx, and Asian people have closed down at an alarming rate during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between February and April of 2020 alone, more than 3 million small businesses closed down across the country. Businesses owned by people of color, women, and immigrants have been most severely harmed, closing down faster than the national average

Self-employed workers in states where businesses are hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic are more likely to face economic hardships, according to new findings from the U.S. Census Bureau’s experimental Household and Small Business Pulse surveys.

This report provides a first look at the effect of COVID-19 and the ensuing economic downturn on America’s small businesses. We examine small business changes in cash balances, revenues, and expenses through April 2020 using a de-identified sample of nearly 1.3 million small firms nationwide. This sample is based on the anonymized transactions of deposit accounts and represents both nonemployer and employer firms. The vast majority—over 80 percent—of small businesses are nonemployers, which is reflected in our sample.

Commissioned by Upwork and Freelancers Union, this study analyzes the size and impact of the freelance economy, as well as the motivations and challenges of this way of working. This year 53 percent of Gen Z workers freelanced—the highest independent workforce participation of any age bracket since FIA’s launch in 2014.

Opportunity Zones (OZs) are gaining momentum, and now that the rules regulating them are clearer, investors, local officials, developers, and businesses have been engaging with the incentive. In the two years since the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 created the incentive and Treasury-designated Zones, hundreds of Qualified Opportunity Funds (QOFs) have been created, and OZ investment was beginning to flow until the COVID-19 crisis began. But has this capital been reaching projects that benefit low- and moderate-income households and communities? Although the program is still maturing,  and the COVID-19 crisis now poses new challenges whose resolution is unknown, this report offers an early, qualitative assessment of how well OZs have channeled capital into projects aligned with equitable development goals.

Since a declaration of emergency for COVID-19 was issued on March 13, 2020, total private employment dropped by over 15 percent. Small businesses employers bore the brunt of the job loss, with a decline of more than 17 percent.

Whether by necessity or ingenuity, minority-owned small businesses may be giving us an early sign of how US businesses will adapt in the wake of COVID-19. These businesses are experimenting with new ways of working to ensure their employees’ safety, offering monetary relief to employees and community members, and introducing new services such as free delivery to those who need it.

Since its founding in 2007, Tricolor has empowered customers by providing access to affordable financing on high quality, certified vehicles in order to enhance the quality of their lives and ultimately help them to build a better future. For more than a decade, Tricolor has successfully scored no file and thin file Hispanics, as evidenced by five well-received ABS securitizations.

In the fourth quarter of 2019, California grew at an annual rate of 2.2%, which was faster than the overall US growth rate of 2.1%. California’s 2019 overall growth rate of 2.6% was down from the 2018 rate of 4.3%. (Source: BEA) In April 2020, the unemployment rate was 15.5%, up from 4.2% in April 2019. This was above the April 2020 national unemployment rate of 14.7%. (Source: CPS)

The U.S. Census Bureau released new estimates showing 1.1 million employer firms were owned by women and 1.0 million by minorities. According to the 2018 Annual Business Survey (ABS), covering year 2017, 5.6% (322,076) of all U.S. businesses were Hispanic-owned and 6.1% (351,237) were owned by veterans.

The Small Business Roundtable (SBR) and Facebook have partnered to release the State of Small Business Report on the impact of small businesses on the U.S. economy. The survey was conducted with approximately 86,000 people who owned, managed or worked for a small or medium-sized business (“SMB”).

This paper takes an early look at the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a large and novel small business support program that was part of the initial policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We use new data on the distribution of the first round of PPP loans and high-frequency microlevel employment data to consider two dimensions of program targeting.

This report provides an analysis of how lending changed overall and in rural vs. urban areas before, during, and after the financial crisis of 2008-2010. The analysis shows that rural firms have poorer access to bank credit than their urban counterparts in terms of both the amount and number of loans and that this situation has deteriorated, rather than improved during the post-crisis years of 2011-2016.

This report and its accompanying interactive map show the vulnerability of every U.S. neighborhood to the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis.

This report offers findings of a survey designed to collect information on the effects of COVID-19 on communities and the entities serving them.

When economic conditions are changing rapidly, data collected in the course of administering government programs can provide valuable information about recent developments. Timely data about economic conditions during the coronavirus pandemic have been provided by initial unemployment insurance claims and applications related to new businesses. These administrative data reveal severe economic disruptions in recent weeks.

The poll, conducted by Chesapeake Beach Consulting for Small Business Majority, surveyed California small business owners between April 7 and 10, 2020. The survey sheds light on a shocking rate of business closures, as well as small business owners’ views on proposals that can help ensure they are able to reopen and recover once the crisis is over. 

With each day that passes, the far-reaching economic implications of the COVID-19 pandemic become increasingly apparent. Of particular concern are the effects the pandemic is having and will continue to have on small businesses as they endure the direct impacts of social distancing directives, including temporary closures and modified operations. With declining revenues, many small firms have had to lay off employees. Governments have begun offering small business loans with attractive interest rates and repayment terms in order to help smooth cash flow and retain employees. While we do not have real-time data on the quickly changing small business conditions, the 2019 Small Business Credit Survey sheds light on how firms are likely to remain afloat during this uncertain time.

The results of the survey raise several important considerations in the current environment: most firms are ill-prepared for a sustained period of revenue loss; firms’ reliance on personal funds could mean severe repercussions for those individuals and households in the event of failure; and many small businesses do not rely on traditional banks for credit, and, therefore, any program designed to support them should take that into consideration.

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act was signed into law on March 27, 2020 and provides the largest amount of fiscal relief to date – approximately $2 trillion. The CARES Act includes one-time cash rebates for low- and middle-income households; additional support for unemployment benefits; loans for small businesses; direct funding for states, local governments, and tribal communities; funds changes to food assistance in the Families First legislation; an array of additional health care supports; and some additional support for human services, housing and homelessness, and student debt relief. While this analysis will focus on the relief and assistance summarized above, the CARES Act also includes $500 billion in loans and other investment for businesses and a series of tax provisions that primarily will primarily benefit large corporations and higher-income households.

CDFI Friendly America: A White Paper Introducing the CDFI Friendly Strategy for Smaller Cities and Towns By Mark A. Pinsky & Adina Abramowitz First posted March 2020 The purpose of this White Paper is to introduce a new way for America’s small citi …

This handbook shines a spotlight on an emerging generation of practical, intelligent activists who are reinventing local financial systems. Even as they criticize capitalism, they are using – and mastering – its financial tools to solve local challenges. In the pages ahead you’ll find an emerging set of tools we call community investment funds. Our purpose and hope in preparing this guide is that you’ll consider creating one of these funds for your own community.

The San Francisco District office has released new data on SBA guaranteed lending programs, accompanied with a user-friendly interface for visualizing and customizing the data to local areas. Create custom reports with lists of businesses that have benefited from SBA programs, find the active lenders in your neighborhood, and see trends going back to 1990.

California’s nonprofits bring more than $40 billion into California each year from out-of-state sources, and one in every 14 California jobs is at a nonprofit.

Entrepreneurial ecosystem building is about growing an environment where entrepreneurial talent can be inspired and supported. More and better entrepreneurial ventures are outcomes of strong community-based entrepreneurial ecosystems.

This report is a co-production of Democracy at Work Institute and the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. It is based on the participating 106 businesses. Only responding businesses that are incorporated, generated revenue and paid workers during FY2018 were included in the effort.

U.S. banks play an integral role as credit suppliers to small businesses. Small businesses comprise of nearly all employer firms in the economy and employ 47.3 percent of the private sector workforce (SBA Advocacy, 2019). The existence and performance of these vibrant businesses depend on how banks and other financial intermediaries are responding to their credit needs. This report uses publicly available data on U.S. banks to analyze the patterns in small business lending.

Older workers are an economically important group as they represent a large and growing portion of the United States workforce. These workers are more likely to experience health conditions that limit their options in terms of the type and amount of work they pursue. Self-employed workers who report a new work-limiting health condition are more likely to remain in the workforce than wage and salary workers who also report a work-limiting health condition. Previous research suggests that self-employment provides more opportunities to accommodate work-limiting health conditions; this report explores whether self-employed workers with work-limiting health conditions report less physically demanding jobs or different hours and weeks worked than wage and salary workers who also report work-limiting health conditions.

Thumbtack released results of its first survey of small business owners in the 2020 presidential election. The data captures sentiment and preferences from over 400 individuals in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina.

As we begin 2020 focused on major program growth, we’re proud to offer these highlights of CalSavers’ historic first year of active participation. In 2019, we saw our first pilot saver contributions on January 2 nd; welcomed our new board chair State Treasurer Fiona Ma on January 7th; fully launched the program statewide on July 1st; supported our early savers in amassing $1.4 million; and made many program enhancements along the way.

As this year’s report findings and policy recommendations demonstrate, we have made significant strides in advancing a new generation of women entrepreneurs. However, much work still lies ahead. In 2020, we will build on the efforts of this past year, with a laser focus on our three main policy priorities—Access to Capital and Opportunity, Women in STEM, and Rural Women’s Entrepreneurship. As a Council, we remain dedicated to furthering our mission.

This research report describes the current state of gender equality in the U.S. venture capital (VC) industry and offers a practical way forward to close its significant gender gaps. It is intended to be an accessible resource for practitioners in the venture ecosystem, as well as a helpful reference document for journalists, scholars, and others interested in understanding gender dynamics in venture capital.

Rural economic development strategies need to adjust to these new trends to include a place-based approach to rural economic development that will foster a healthy ecosystem for the creation and growth of small businesses. This toolkit describes the elements of a healthy ecosystem. The introduction flushes out why a new economic development tool is needed and briefly describes the elements. The five subsequent chapters explore more in-depth the five elements that make up a strong ecosystem.

Leaders in philanthropy increasingly recognize the role of business in advancing their objectives. To date, the focus of most efforts to engage business has been primarily on large companies. By contrast, the role of small business in creating healthy, equitable communities has generally not been explored.

The Richmond Fed’s recent report, Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) by the Numbers, provides findings from the 2019 Federal Reserve CDFI Survey. CDFIs are specialized financial institutions operating in markets that are underserved by traditional financial institutions.

Small businesses show strength in self-employment increases, proprietors’ income gains, job creation advances and births staying above deaths. Loan delinquency rates remain low, but small business loan demand is waning.

FUND CI conducted research to identify the best practices of CDFIs that are recognized as being ahead of the curve in fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion both internally and externally. The purpose is to share both innovative and replicable practices for use by other CDFIs in advancing their own diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces.

The nonprofit sector is a powerful economic engine in California, especially when it comes to employment and wages. The nonprofit industry employs more than 1.2 million Californians and, in 2016, paid a total of $74 Billion in wages.

Agri-FoodTech is an emerging category within the food startup universe with enormous potential to impact critical issues from climate change to food insecurity. More and more venture capital is being invested in the sector, but it’s not reaching one of the leading groups of entrepreneurs—female founders.

New Census figures released show rising income inequality across the state and millions of California residents who are struggling to get by on extremely low incomes, while higher-income households experienced more income growth. Even as the latest figures also show there is a decline in the official poverty rate in California, these findings underscore the need for policymakers to ensure that the benefits of California’s strong economy and recent economic growth are shared among all Californians.

There are an estimated 30.7 million small businesses (defined as those with fewer than 500 employees) in the United States, employing approximately 60 million people.1 Small firms make up 99 percent of U.S. employers, and these businesses create 66 percent of new private-sector jobs.2 Small businesses, like their larger counterparts, have not been shielded from the increasing cost of health care. Without advantages such as a larger pool of insured employees, more bargaining power with health insurance companies, and the benefit of full-time human resources personnel, small-business owners are often left with little recourse and few options when a health insurance carrier hikes costs.

Better-qualified black and Hispanic testers who shopped for small business loans at Los Angeles area bank branches were treated worse than less qualified white testers, a new study found. The study, from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), also found steep declines in government-backed lending to black business owners between 2008 and 2016.

This report explores ways business ownership can serve as a wealth-building tool for women, explains the systemic barriers impeding women’s ability to build wealth through business ownership, and suggests ways grant makers, policy advocates, and practitioners can intentionally promote wealth-building by entrepreneurial women through business ownership.

In this report, we provide an up-to-date overview of the current economic conditions for Latinos, focused on the four key relating factors of income distribution, education, housing, and entrepreneurship. The report establishes a baseline of data that can be used to measure Latino economic progress over time. We also introduce the Latino Economic Index (LEI) that provides a visual data snapshot of Latino economic well-being at the regional and community level in California. With this index, we explore geographic hot spots of opportunity and identify areas that call for the most urgent investment and policy outcomes.

California’s economy in 2018 ranks as the fifth largest in the world – larger than the UK, India, France, Brazil, Italy, Canada, Korea, and Russia. 

The MBO Partners State of Independence report presents an annual snapshot of a rapidly evolving and increasingly important component of the U.S. economy: the independent workforce. In 2019, the 9th annual report and the industry’s longest-running comprehensive study shows that the independent workforce is strong and confident.

Small businesses are essential to the economic infrastructure of both lower-income and higher-income neighborhoods. In this report, we compare small business performance in lower-income vs higher-income areas. Findings offer some directions for growing small businesses in LMI and ethnic/minority neighborhoods.

This report is based on research findings from focus groups and interviews. The focus groups were conducted with LMI individuals in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego, and the interviews were done with policy experts, regulators and representatives from the financial services sector. In sharing their experiences with the financial system, we have identified common challenges encountered by LMI consumers of color, and offer recommendations to address on-going barriers to financial inclusion.

This guide gives ecosystem builders and local developers an overview of key concepts and general recommendations on how to use entrepreneurship ecosystem building to develop high-growth entrepreneurship in communities of color. The information in this guide was compiled through conversations with industry leaders, prior research and current ecosystem builders who have designed and led successful inclusive ecosystem building strategies in communities of color.

Overall California Economy• In the third quarter of 2018, California grew at an annual rate of 3.5%, which was faster than the overall US growth rate of 3.4%. California’s 2017 growth rate of 3.0% was down from the 2016 rate of 3.1%. (Source: BEA)• In February 2019, the unemployment rate was 4.2%, down from 4.3% in February 2018. This was above the February 2019 national unemployment rate of 3.8%. (Source: CPS)

America’s credit reporting system is controlled by 3 big, for-profit companies—Experian, Transunion, and Equifax—which collect lending and payment data on 220 million Americans. They collect this data without consumers’ permission or approval, there is no way for consumers to opt out, and consumers must pay to access their own scores.

In March 2019, the Office of Advocacy published a fact sheet titled “Small Business Facts: Spotlight on Women-Owned Employer Businesses”, written by Nora Esposito, Economic Research Fellow. This fact sheet highlights contributions made by 1.1 million women-owned employer businesses to the U.S. economy, as well as areas for future growth. The fact sheet also provides information on industrial and geographic diversity of women-owned employer businesses. Read the fact sheet to learn more.

NTEN and partner Cornerstone asked nonprofit staff in all departments and of all job types to share their experiences of the practices, culture, and investment in professional development at their organization.

Small Business, Big Dreams profiles nine National CAPACD members that serve AAPI small business clients in low-income communities across the country. The work of these community-based organizations is critical to maintaining and promoting the vitality of AAPI neighborhoods. This report provides a more nuanced narrative about the challenges to wealth building through entrepreneurship in low-income AAPI communities.

The CDFI Coalition, representing the nation’s Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), released a new report at a gathering of lawmakers, industry leaders and stakeholders today in Washington, DC. The report showcases 67 CDFIs’ work in revitalizing rural and urban areas across the country and their success in creating economic opportunity, jobs, and services.

Small Business Majority published a new report, California small business owners support policies to expand health coverage access and lower costs. The poll of 300 California small business owners revealed entrepreneurs strongly support proposals to bolster the state’s healthcare system, including expanding access to tax credits and addressing issues related to cost and transparency.

Today, there are about 40 million millennial women, representing 31.5% of the female population in the U.S. Millennial women do not benefit from many economic policies and systems designed by, and built to meet the needs of, men as primary breadwinners. Millennial women came of age during the Great Recession, the rise of mass incarceration, unprecedented student debt levels, and changing workforce dynamics. All of these factors contribute to the fact that millennial women are 37% more likely than Generation Xers (those born between 1965 and 1984) to be living below the federal poverty line and are more likely to be underemployed or unemployed than previous generations.

Nonprofit research organization MDRC and Grameen America, Inc., the fastest growing nonprofit microfinance organization in the United States, today released the early results of a research study, Microfinance in the United States: Early Impacts of the Grameen America Program. The study, funded by Robin Hood, is the most rigorous, independent, third-party evaluation of group microfinance in the United States, assessing Grameen America’s program, a microfinance model that provides small loans to low-income women entrepreneurs in the United States seeking to launch or expand small businesses. 

The Office of Advocacy’s Small Business Economic Bulletin for March 2019 shows gains in the number of employer small firms, owner’s income, and net job creation. The recovery of small business lending remains tentative, even with low loan delinquency rates. The bulletin provides the latest quarterly government statistics on small business income, job creation, startups, and finance. Read the Small Business Economic Bulletin to learn more.

We at Thumbtack, along with our partner for this report, Square, take pride in our shared mission to make it easier than ever for aspiring entrepreneurs to take the leap and start their own business. And in celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8 and Women’s History Month, we fielded an extensive survey of female small business owners to better understand their experiences of working for themselves.

With limited financial sophistication, entrepreneurial consumers approach the financial marketplace more like retail financial consumers than like business customers. However, an assumption of both legislators and regulators is that business borrowers are more financially savvy than consumer borrowers and thus do not require protections that are as broad reaching. This gap between marketplace policy protections and the lived reality of the vast majority of small business entrepreneurs sets the stage for entrepreneurial consumers to fall through the regulatory cracks, creating the potential for exploitation and abuse. This situation may be exacerbated for minority entrepreneurs, who belong to protected classes that generally are more vulnerable to exploitation in marketplaces, including the small business lending marketplace. This article details the current status of the policy gap relative to minority entrepreneurial consumers and presents a matched-pair mystery shopping study to demonstrate the critical need for reliable, primary data to inform regulatory agencies as they work to implement appropriate protections to ensure equal access to credit across the small business lending marketplace.

In February 2019, the Office of Advocacy published a fact sheet titled “Small Business Facts: What Is the Status of Bank Credit to Small Businesses?” written by Victoria Williams, Research Economist. The fact sheet finds that small business lending growth lagged behind large business lending growth from 2016 to 2017. While small banks had higher shares of small business loans relative to their assets than large banks, large banks issued the majority of small business loans overall. Read the fact sheet to learn more.

CDFA is pleased to announce the debut of our first white paper on how traditional development finance tools can be used to demonstrate the viability of the food system as an asset class. Many food-related initiatives, projects, and businesses have lacked sufficient resources and financing for economic and community development, largely because the food system as a whole has not been formally defined as an asset class.

This new report explores the potential for using entrepreneurship to engage and create pathways for opportunity youth, by examining existing entrepreneurship programs and sharing emerging models for creating and adapting entrepreneurship programming targeted to the specific needs and aspirations of opportunity youth.

The Prosperity Now Scorecard is a comprehensive resource for data on household financial health, racial economic inequality and policy recommendations to help put everyone in our country on a path to prosperity.

FUND Community Institute continues to engage in dialogue and analysis around data from its landmark study, Perception versus Reality:  Women and Change in the CDFI Industry (available at www.fundci.org).  This month, we examined the prevalence of women as leaders of CDFIs, and how this role may have changed since the founding of the industry. The findings suggest that women are playing leadership roles in large numbers (although not at all sizes and types of CDFIs) and that the organizations they head up may be leading the way in fostering more inclusive, family-friendly work environments.

Simply put, the purpose of this e-book is to help you fully understand what taking on an online loan truly involves and how it can impact your bottom line. While many money guides are loaded with jargon and confusing language, we break down everything you need to know into easy-to-grasp terms and examples based on real-life situations.

The 2018 Roadmap to Shared Prosperity outlines the California Economic Summit’s plans for a comprehensive agenda to address with a triple bottom line approach to solving the state’s biggest challenges.

Nonemployer firms are important to the United States’ economy, comprising 81% of all small businesses, employing 17% of the American workforce, and generating $1.2 trillion in annual sales. While previous research has explored why individuals seek self-employment or what conditions drive nonemployers to become employer firms, less is understood about the financial experiences and challenges of nonemployers—namely, whether or not nonemployers are succeeding financially.

Covering five years of business progress, the 2017 Worker Cooperative State of the Sector is a report on worker-owned business in the United States. This report is a co-production of Democracy at Work Institute and U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, drawing upon the latest developments in the field, and deepens our understanding of the sector.

Millennial women, those born between 1982 and 2000, represent the future of entrepreneurship in America. According to the 2015 Census Bureau data, there are 83.1 million millennials in the United States. By the year 2025, millennials will comprise 75 percent of the American workforce, and many will become entrepreneurs.

The gender wealth gap continues growing even though single women have benefited from regulatory protections to reduce wealth stripping and have had increased access to institutions, products, and services that help them build wealth. This growing gap not only impacts their financial security in retirement but also their ability to pass resources on to future generations. To shepherd our collective efforts and move the needle to improve the economic well-being of single low-income women, we must understand how asset inequality is compounded by structural barriers to wealth building for women, including accessing income, tax benefits, social services programs, and financial products and services.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond has researched developments in the community development financial institution (CDFI) industry on a regular basis since the 2009 inaugural launch of the biennial Survey of CDFIs in the Southeast. 

In a world where news about cyber attacks and hackers regularly make the headlines, we knew it was necessary to better understand how nonprofit organizations were – or were not – managing security and privacy. NTEN and Microsoft surveyed more than 250 nonprofits across the US for the first State of Nonprofit Cybersecurity Report.

The contribution and importance of small businesses to the nation’s economy is well-researched and understood; for minority-owned small businesses, the impact and significance are even greater. Not only do minority-owned small businesses help drive job creation, raise wages, and elevate better standards of living, they also offer a critical pathway for Black and Hispanic populations to close the racial wealth gap. An increase in entrepreneurship among people of color can create income for both entrepreneurs and the people of color who work at the businesses. Yet, starting a new firm or growing an established business requires capital, and Black and Hispanic businesses have higher barriers to accessing capital.

Part of the US Small Business Administration’s mission is to facilitate a successful transition to civilian life for military veterans. Understanding the current state of veteran entrepreneurship, in particular, the type of challenges veterans face in starting and growing businesses is fundamental to fulfilling this responsibility. The US Small Business Administration’s Office of Veteran Business Development (OVBD) has partnered with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to examine veteran business financing, which is critically tied to their performance and growth. Of particular concern for policymakers is whether veterans have a more difficult time accessing capital than nonveteran business owners. In order to substantiate policy intervention on behalf of veteran entrepreneurs, it is necessary to size the market and understand the needs and challenges. While anecdotal evidence points to capital access challenges, systematic data collection has been limited. This paper first outlines the current literature on veteran entrepreneurship and then presents new small business credit data from the Federal Reserve Banks’ Small Business Credit Survey. The data, for the first time, provide substantial evidence that veteran-owned businesses face greater difficulty in accessing capital relative to nonveteran-owned businesses.

This study, conducted by an independent research firm and commissioned in partnership by Upwork and Freelancers Union, surveyed more than 6,000 U.S. workers. In its fifth annual year, findings show Americans are spending more than 1 billion hours per week freelancing. Beyond quantifying the amount of freelancing happening, new insights delve into why people are increasingly choosing to work this way.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will widen racial disparities in economic well-being, according to the new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), released with Prosperity Now. ITEP’s estimates provide valuable insights into how the recent federal tax changes will worsen the wealth disparity between white families and families of color.

This National Consumer Law Center report examines the annual percentage rate (APR), including both interest and fees, allowed in each state and the District of Columbia for a $10,000 five-year loan. An APR cap is the single most effective step states can implement to deter abusive lending and ensure that families are not caught in a debt trap that’s nearly impossible to escape.

California Feudalism: The Squeeze on The Middle Class Chapman University, Center for Demographics and Policy First published October 2018 California was built by people with aspirations, many of them lacking cultural polish or elite educations, but ded …

Upstart Co-Lab has published The Community Reinvestment Act and the Creative Economy: Investing in Creative Places and Businesses as Part of Comprehensive Community Development  with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The following report presents four nonprofit organizations implementing workplace-based financial coaching models: $tand by Me located in Delaware, Working Credit NFP in Illinois, Neighborhood Trust in New York, and WorkLife Partnership in Colorado.

In conjunction with the Partnership for Lending in Underserved Markets (PLUM), a Milken Institute and U.S. Small Business Administration initiative to develop actionable solutions to long-standing barriers that constrain minority entrepreneurs from accessing capital, the PLUM Los Angeles Technical Assistance Working Group spent considerable time exploring what culturally competent technical assistance looks like and identifying best practices around program design, service delivery, curriculum, and marketing and outreach.

Black women launch new businesses more often than any other group in the nation. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City went to the source to find out what motivates them to take the leap. Black Women Business Startups, by Dell Gines, a senior community development advisor, offers a research-driven look at black women business owners, their business insights, and ideas for increasing the number, strength, and growth of businesses owned by black women.

Given the relationship between a small business’s access to financing and its outcomes, and given the growing share of minorities in the U.S. population, it is important that creditworthy firms and entrepreneurs, irrespective of race or ethnicity, are able to secure adequate financing to achieve growth and success. Data from the Federal Reserve System’s 2016 Small Business Credit Survey allow for a closer examination of the experiences of minority-owned small businesses in applying for and obtaining financing.

The growth and survival of U.S. small businesses depend on how depository lending institutions and other financial intermediaries are attending to the credit needs of small firms. The financing and credit needs of small firms vary by business size, type of lender, business owner, and age of the business. Thus, all these components tend to contribute to the challenges small firms face when seeking access to credit. Nonetheless, 99.7 percent of firms with paid employees are small businesses, employing 47.5 percent of the private workforce in 2015 (SBA Advocacy, 2018). These tenacious businesses accounted for roughly 40 percent of U.S. private nonfarm output (Petkov, 2016), and for 63 percent share of net jobs between 2010 and 2016 (SBA Advocacy, 2017). This study predominantly uses public sources of information on U.S. banks to analyze the patterns in small business lending by evaluating aggregate data of depository lending institutions.

The State of Women-Owned Businesses reports are used by the women’s enterprise development community — media, funders, entrepreneurial support organizations, elected officials, suppliers and customers and even women themselves–to inform practices, policies and advocacy efforts that encourage successful business outcomes, as well as to inspire and motivate women to start and grow businesses.

Research conducted by Website Planet (WSP) recently uncovered that female freelancers are being paid significantly less than men—in some cases half as much—on two of the most highly used and reputable freelance job platforms, Upwork and Fiverr. This is shocking. For women tied to the gig economy and rely on these very same websites to find jobs, this is directly tied to their own personal livelihood.

Since 2012, the Thumbtack Small Business Friendliness Survey has surveyed thousands of entrepreneurs on the state and local public policies that affect their ability to start, operate, and grow a business. It is the largest continuous study of small business perceptions of government policy in the United States.

Last year, Congressman Cleaver launched a groundbreaking investigation into the small business lending practices of Financial Technology (FinTech) companies, studying the various methods companies use to protect against discriminatory practices. One of the primary concerns raised by Congressman Cleaver was the specific algorithms used by FinTech firms. While many FinTech firms claim these algorithms protect against discrimination, they have generally provided little evidence into how they are utilized to do so. The questions surrounding the algorithms are particularly troubling because, in some cases, they have the ability to utilize certain information about loan-seekers without their knowledge. Information collected can come from a wide range of sources, including the loan seeker’s Twitter or Facebook profiles, specifically who they follow, and the number of criminal records and/or bankruptcies in the loan seeker’s zip code. Not only is this information unrelated to the purposes of loan-seeking, it can be used to discriminate against certain people, predominantly lower-income borrowers and people of color. The following report includes the detailed findings of Congressman Cleaver’s investigation.

This Municipal Blueprint is designed to guide municipal leaders and advocates toward meaningful, manageable and moveable policy solutions for building financial security within communities of color. We include approaches and strategies that complement both city-level advocacy and the tools and concepts described for racial wealth equity advocacy in our Racial Equity Primer. The policies presented here will not solve every problem, but they can lay the first steps along a pathway to prosperity for all city-dwellers.

The California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC) consulted nonprofit members, partners, and allies, including financial services providers, to develop recommendations for banks on how to better support immigrant clients in the current political climate.

The report starts with background and context on the importance of small businesses to the U.S. economy as well as recent trends in small business health and access to credit. The first section discusses ways to improve the quality and quantity of data available on small business financing. Good data are necessary both to improve credit-application processes and to enable lawmakers and regulators to make better-informed decisions when developing government policy. The second section reviews the financial regulation that impacts access to credit for small businesses and recommends ways to recalibrate regulations to make them more efficient and effective. The third section delves into how to make U.S. capital markets work better for small businesses. The final section sets forth ideas on how policymakers can promote innovation in financial products and services and better integrate technology into financial markets.

The MBO Partners State of Independence report, the industry’s longest running comprehensive study of the American independent workforce, serves as a State of the Union for a dynamic movement. In 2018, the 8th annual report finds that the state of the independent workforce is strong, evolving, and multi-faceted.

This report discusses findings of a study conducted by the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland to gauge small business owners’ perceptions of online lenders and their understanding and interpretation of information online lenders use to describe their credit products. The Federal Reserve has an ongoing interest in small businesses and their access to the credit they need to succeed and grow. As the small business credit market evolves, prompting discussion about borrower protections, the perspectives of small business owners are an important consideration.

The United Ways of California released “Struggling to Stay Afloat: The Real Cost Measure in California 2018,” a new statewide report on financial challenges for working families.

Through the Milken Institute and U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) Partnership for Lending in Underserved Markets (PLUM) initiative, we are learning how to improve collaborative efforts in a given market and around specific capital access solutions. There have been many across-the-board lessons learned through our local pilot programs and national work to date. Some speak to approaches to partnership and coalition-building while others are reflections and recommendations for existing capital and technical service providers.

This report makes a compelling economic argument for the social justice imperative of racial equity. Beyond an increase in economic output, advancing racial equity can translate into meaningful increases in consumer spending and tax revenues, and decreases in social services spending and health-related costs. For example, in consumer spending alone, closing the racial equity gap in Michigan would generate an additional $1.5 billion in spending on food, $4 billion on housing, $423 million on apparel, $2 billion on automobiles and transportation, and $625 million on entertainment each year. An additional $1.5 billion would be generated in state and local tax revenues.

The Federal Reserve released “2017 Small Business Credit Survey: Report on Employer Firms.” Learn more about how small business owners nationwide are faring, including their credit needs and challenges. The report examines the results of an annual survey of small business owners nationwide and focuses on small employer firms, businesses with 1-499 full- or part-time employees.

Over the last 25 years, about 7–9 percent of employer firms close every year and a slightly higher share open. These figures have been trending down, illustrating a decline in business turnover.

The goal of this report is to support the council in establishing a knowledge base about women business owners’, leaders’, and entrepreneurs’ access to markets for goods and services. This report represents a high-level situational analysis, exploring major issues and developments affecting women entrepreneurs to inform the NWBC’s framework for defining research priorities and engagement efforts.

Businesses for Responsible Tax Reform released “The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act; Implications for Small Businesses” that argues that the new tax laws put small businesses at a disadvantage to large businesses.

The Small Business Profiles are an annual portrait of each state’s small businesses. They gather the latest federal data into state-by-state snapshots of small business health and economic activity. Limited economic data is also provided for the U.S. territories.

This report examines opportunities to further enhance inclusion and support of current and future women founders in Washington, D.C.’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Its analysis provides an overview of women-owned businesses both nationally and in Washington, D.C., makes four top-level recommendations with pragmatic strategies for implementation, and highlights existing approaches to inclusive development.

The Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, New York, Dallas, and Richmond issued the 2017 Small Business Credit Survey: Report on Disaster-Affected Firms. This is the first in a series of reports this year examining the results of an annual survey of small business owners. 61 percent of affected firms had revenue losses ranging from $1-$25,000, and 35 percent had revenue losses over $25,000.

Accion in the U.S. and Opportunity Fund recently released a groundbreaking report that examines the impact of mission-based small business lending services on borrowers’ businesses, their household financial security, and their overall quality of life.

Credit Builders Alliance released Achieving Credit Strength: A Toolkit for Supporting Returning Citizen Entrepreneurs. This toolkit provides financial capability and reentry practitioners with tools and resources for helping returning citizens to build strong credit, and strong businesses. In conjunction with the release of this toolkit, CBA is hosting convenings in partnership with community leaders that are experts in this space. Participants will have the opportunity to interact with the toolkit and national experts discussing credit building, entrepreneurship and ways to support the financial stability of returning citizens pre- and post-incarceration. See below for more details on each convening.

Aspen’s FIELD program released a new report, “The Price of Access: How Scale-Focused Microlenders Are Pricing for Growth.” The report explores how microfinance institutions are pricing their smallest loans at higher interest rates in order to expand their reach. The resulting revenue allows them to meet the needs of more underserved entrepreneurs.

On May 16, 2016, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s new investment crowdfunding rule, Regulation Crowdfunding (Regulation CF), went into effect, marking an important step in the federal government embracing financial technology (FinTech) to increase access to capital for small businesses. Regulation Crowdfunding enabled small businesses to raise up to $1,000,000 annually by offering and selling securities through internet-based crowdfunding campaigns. This issue brief analyzes all crowdfunding filings made pursuant to Regulation CF during the first year of activity (May 16, 2016 – May 16, 2017). It highlights key attributes of the firms that have attempted to raise capital through this financing method, including firm location, legal structure, age, employment, and gender. This analysis also describes trends among the online intermediaries responsible for hosting the campaigns as well as transactional characteristics, such as the type of securities offered and the amount of capital sought and raised. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy implications for small businesses seeking capital through crowdfunding and other innovative financing methods.

Thumbtack surveyed more than 14,000 small business owners 55 and older across the United States, to evaluate the business friendliness of their local governments, what motivated them to start their own small business and how their experience impacts their business success.

Understanding the sources of mismatch between the labor pool and the needs of firms is important. There can be significant variation in hiring challenges by type of firm, and how a firm responds may depend systematically on the nature of the problem. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank’s 2017 Small Business Credit Survey allows for a closer examination of hiring difficulties and firm responses.

In August 2016, Prosperity Now, in collaboration with the Institute for Policy Studies, published The EverGrowing Gap: Without Change, African American and Latino Families Won’t Match White Wealth for Centuries. In the report, we examined data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances over a 30-year period (1983-2013) to understand the scope of the racial wealth divide facing Black and Latino households and to project the future of racial wealth inequality. In exploring wealth inequality facing these communities, we looked at average rather than median economic data.

This research seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the successful crowdfunding on Kiva, a non-profit lending crowdfunding platform based in the U.S. It investigates whether a larger social network will increase the likelihood of women’s success on Kiva in comparison to their male counterparts. To this end, using a novel dataset received from Kiva for the period between 2011 and 2017, a series of multiple logistic regression analysis was conducted. These analyses were coupled by iv comprehensive descriptive analysis to better distill and describe the gender dynamics, as well as the relationship between women’s success and crowdfunding variables on Kiva. 

The study attempts to investigate, from a gender perspective, the role of a project creator’s online social network in contributing to the success of fundraising campaigns in reward-based crowdfunding. It also tries to provide a deeper insight into successful crowdfunding dynamics. Using a novel dataset received from Kickstarter (i.e. the largest reward crowdfunding platform in the U.S.) for the period between 2009 (its inception) and 2017, a series of logistic and linear regression analyses were conducted. These analyses were combined with comprehensive descriptive analysis and extensive visuals to better illustrate and explain the gender dynamics, as well as the relationship between women’s success and crowdfunding variables on Kickstarter.

EPIC’s particular focus is on non-mortgage consumer debt, such as loans to pay for college or to purchase a vehicle, money borrowed on credit cards, and non-loan debt (i.e. municipal fines and fees, medical debt, and unpaid bills). Non-mortgage debt has not received the extensive attention given to housing borrowing, largely because of the size of the mortgage market. However, housing debt is declining as a share of household debt and current causes for concern—such as rising rate of serious delinquency in credit cards and the emergence of subprime auto loans—relate to other areas of the market. This primer distills the research on consumer debt, from its drivers and its dimensions to its impacts on households and society as a whole. EPIC will use this critical knowledge base to articulate a framework for developing solutions to improve the financial lives of millions of Americans.

NAWBO released a white paper – “Spotlight on H.R. 5050: The Bill that Changed Everything for Women Business Owners”. The paper reflects on the provisions that transformed the course for women business owners and highlights the current areas for improved policy and better women involvement.

The goal of this report is to support the council in establishing a knowledge base about women business owners’, leaders’, and entrepreneurs’ access to capital. This report represents a high-level situational analysis, exploring major issues and developments affecting women entrepreneurs to inform the NWBC’s framework for defining research priorities and engagement efforts.

A scientific opinion poll performed in four Senate battleground states and with a +10 Republican sample (41% R, 31%D), significantly higher than the national average, shows the majority of small business owners will not be able to hire new employees or give raises because of the new tax law. When asked if they would hire a new employee as a result of the new tax law, 69% of the plurality Republican sample said they would not, while only 25% said they would. When asked if they will be giving their employees raises due to the new tax law, 59% said no, while 31% responded that they would.

The SBA issued “Financing Patterns and Credit Market Experiences: A Comparison by Race and Ethnicity for U.S. Employer Firms“. Hispanic and Black Americans are underrepresented in business ownership compared with their shares of the general population. Asians (73 percent) Hispanics (72 percent) and Blacks or African Americans (70 percent) rely on owner’s personal or family savings as a source of startup capital, while 65 percent of Whites relying on this source.

In light of recent developments in U.S. immigration policy, WalletHub compared the economic impact of foreign-born populations on the 50 states and the District of Columbia. We determined which states benefit the most — and least — from immigration using 19 key indicators. Our dataset ranges from median household income of foreign-born population to jobs generated by immigrant-owned businesses as a share of total jobs. 

An important contributor to economic inequality in the United States is the large and persistent racial and ethnic disparity found in business ownership and performance. Blocked opportunities for minorities to start and grow businesses create losses in economic efficiency, especially through their effects on limiting job creation, wealth accumulation, innovation, and local economic growth. This report provides several new findings on Latino business ownership and success using the latest available Census Bureau data. Latinos are separated by U.S.-born vs. immigrant status to provide insights into the constraints faced in starting and running successful businesses.

Amazon released its first-ever Small Business Impact Report which found more than 1 million U.S.-based small and medium-sized businesses are selling on Amazon. That report needs to be digested along with the loss of local tax revenue and what happens to Main Street that was reported in Amazon and Empty Storefronts: The Fiscal and Land Use Impacts of Online Retail.

The physical location of rural small employer firms in less densely populated areas presents an economic, demographic and cultural context that is distinct from the one in which urban small employer firms operate. This Report on Rural Employer Firms compares the business and financing conditions of small employer firms located in rural areas to those located in urban areas. This report is part of a series of reports that use data from the 2016 Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS), a national data-collection effort by the twelve Federal Reserve Banks. All differences between urban and rural small employer firms highlighted in this report are statistically significant based on credibility intervals.

I have spent the past two weeks visiting the United States, at the invitation of the federal government, to look at whether the persistence of extreme poverty in America undermines the enjoyment of human rights by its citizens.  In my travels through California, Alabama, Georgia, Puerto Rico, West Virginia, and Washington DC I have spoken with dozens of experts and civil society groups, met with senior state and federal government officials and talked with many people who are homeless or living in deep poverty.  I am grateful to the Trump Administration for facilitating my visit and for its continuing cooperation with the UN Human Rights Council’s accountability mechanisms that apply to all states.

Many urban and rural communities throughout the country lack the capital and resources necessary to create opportunity and promote growth. The community development financial institution (“CDFI”) industry has focused on filling this gap by investing extensively in these communities to improve their economies, physical environment and the financial well-being of residents. In many ways, CDFIs have been pioneers of promoting progress by investing for social impact.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship, released a report titled: “Tackling the Gender Gap: What Women Entrepreneurs Need to Thrive.” This timely study draws on interviews with 14 female entrepreneurs, who detail the obstacles they faced and how they overcame them, to highlight current initiatives and provide recommendations to eliminate the unique barriers confronting women-owned small businesses.

This report is one in a series based on the findings of the 2016 Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS), a national collaboration of the Community Development Offices of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks. As a supplement to the Report on Employer Firms released in April 2017, this Report on Microbusinesses details findings on the financing experiences and outcomes of the smallest firms in the United States, including the self-employed.

This report uses a unique dataset to examine the experiences of women-owned small employer firms, especially as compared to their men-owned peers. Small employer firms have traditionally played an important role in U.S. job creation,8 and women-owned firms are an emerging share of the sector. Understanding the opportunities and challenges facing this growing segment of women-owned employers can provide insight into future economic contributions of the sector overall. 

For the past decade, Catherine Marshall has helped foundations, collaboratives, and associations design and launch their own Peer Learning Community Programs tailored to their constituents. This document is her effort to share what she learned works, and doesn’t work, with this method and to provide a practical program model as a place to start.

This report is the third in a series of reports based on the 2016 Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS), a national collaboration of the Community Development Offices of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks. As a key financial regulator and economic policymaker, the Federal Reserve System plays an important role in ensuring fair access to credit and promoting economic growth for the well-being of all Americans. Small businesses are an important component of economic success and strong communities; they are responsible for 48% of private sector employees nationwide, are important drivers of local and regional economic growth, and are an important source of household wealth. A healthy small business environment depends on an array of factors, not least of which is the ability to access funds for starting up, scaling up, or maintaining operations. However, as a growing number of studies document, access to funds—whether debt, equity, or personal resources— can vary across race and ethnicity even when business owners are similar in other respects such as business performance and credit risk.

A study examining disparities in small business lending conducted by the Woodstock Institute found that Fresno minority businesses are losing out in capital and turning to merchant cash advances. (Yikes!) Access Capital, a CAMEO member, is trying to refinance some of those loans.

This report develops a profile of the veteran women business owner through the presentation of business and business owner characteristics from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2007 and 2012 Survey of Business Owners and Self-Employed Persons and 2015 Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs. It is not meant to be all inclusive but, rather, to highlight the current landscape of veteran women-owned firms based off of publicly available data.

The poll, conducted for Small Business Majority by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, found small business owners are generally optimistic about economic conditions for small businesses and want tax reform that levels the playing field for their small business. The poll was an online survey of 500 small business owners conducted between September 29 and October 4, 2017.

The fourth annual Freelancing in America study shows what many freelancers know intuitively: The freelance workforce is growing rapidly and adapting quickly in a fast-changing economy. The Freelancers Union projects that independent workers will be a majority of the U.S. workforce in just a decade.

The National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) released “Necessity as a Driver of Women’s Entrepreneurship” this week. The report examines whether and how women turn to entrepreneurship to address potential market failures that limit their ability to attain or maintain economic self-sufficiency, or as an avenue to overcome flexibility bias and potential stigma in balancing work-life conflict assumed in traditional gendered roles and social norms. 

The Office of Advocacy’s fact sheet, “Small Business Job Creation Deconstructed,” shows that small businesses’ role as job creators since the Great Recession is as strong as ever. Since the end of the Great Recession, small businesses (fewer than 500 employees) have created 62 percent (8.3 million) of the net new private-sector jobs (13.4 million), matching their historic rate over the last 25 years.

The SBA issued The Retreat of the Rural Entrepreneur. In 1988, more than a fourth of the self-employed lived in rural areas. By 2016, that share had fallen to less than 1 in 6 as the US population shifted away from rural areas and the rural rate of self-employment fell. In fact, between 1988 and 2016, the rural rate of self-employment fell by over 20 percent. Despite that decline, the rate of self-employment has remained higher in rural areas than in urban and suburban areas.

Starting a new firm or growing an established business requires capital, but Black and Hispanic businesses are reported to have higher barriers to capital access. The challenges are well documented and many solutions have been proposed, but to achieve change, we need to move ideas into action. The federal government actually has a lot of programs that can help. Between the Small Business Administration’s (SBA’s) Community Advantage Loan Program, Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund), Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), and the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization(OSDBU), there is potential to mobilize resources that drive job creation and economic growth, especially in minority communities throughout the country. We need to leverage these resources, as well as develop and execute new solutions.

Hispanic Women Entrepreneurship: Understanding Diversity Among Hispanic Women Entrepreneurs identifies the unique characteristics of Hispanic women entrepreneurs, reviews entrepreneurship training practices that work to encourage successful business, highlights specific programs that exemplify these practices, and suggests targeted tactics to unlock their entrepreneurial potential.

The California Reinvestment Coalition released Small Business Owners Struggle to Access Affordable Credit, a new report focused on the challenges small business owners and entrepreneurs face when trying to get a loan to start, maintain, or grow their businesses.

Prosperity Now and the Institute for Policy Studies look at the racial wealth divide at the median over the next four and eight years in The Road to Zero Wealth. They find that if you examine median wealth trends over the past three decades, the racial wealth divide will only continue to grow—into perpetuity—and it will do so at an accelerated rate.

Equity Profiles project by PolicyLink recently produced a report for San Francisco, the Bay Area and Los Angeles County. Each profile presents demographic trends and assess how well regions are doing to ensure its diverse residents can participate in the region’s economic vitality, contribute to the readiness of the workforce, and connect to the region’s assets and opportunities.

Equity Profiles project by PolicyLink recently produced a report for San Francisco, the Bay Area and Los Angeles County. Each profile presents demographic trends and assess how well regions are doing to ensure its diverse residents can participate in the region’s economic vitality, contribute to the readiness of the workforce, and connect to the region’s assets and opportunities.

Equity Profiles project by PolicyLink recently produced a report for San Francisco, the Bay Area and Los Angeles County. Each profile presents demographic trends and assess how well regions are doing to ensure its diverse residents can participate in the region’s economic vitality, contribute to the readiness of the workforce, and connect to the region’s assets and opportunities.

This report is the second in a series of reports based on the 2016 Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS), a national collaboration of the Community Development Offices of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks. As a followup to the Report on Employer Firms issued in April 2017, the Report on Startup Firms provides an in-depth look at the financing and credit experiences of startups with employees—which we define as small businesses that were five years old or younger in 2016 and had full- or part-time employees.

The SBA Office of Advocacy released a report on the impact of microbusiness on the national economy. Microbusinesses, defined in the fact sheet as firms with 1-9 employees, are the smallest of the smalls but they are the most common type of small business and exhibit an oversized role in employment.

The report, entitled “Stuck From The Start: The Financial Challenges of Low- and Moderate-Income African-American Entrepreneurs in the South,” reflects interviews with 30 African-American business owners in eastern North Carolina, southwestern Georgia and the Jackson and Delta regions of Mississippi. The project was launched to better understand why Black-owned businesses struggle to succeed relative to their White peers.

Prosperity Now (formerly known as CFED) released its 2017 Scorecard, which finds that even as many major economic indices suggest that the U.S. economy is gaining momentum, only a lucky few are actually enjoying the opportunity to get by and get ahead. The Scorecard measures how states’ residents are faring economically and what the states do to put them on stronger financial footing. This year’s Scorecard assesses the states on 113 measures in five issue areas: Financial Assets & Income, Businesses & Jobs, Home ownership & Housing, Health Care and Education.

This report explores entrepreneurship among millennial women via multiple avenues. First, the report covers existing research on millennial entrepreneurship, including how the media portrays these entrepreneurs. This section highlights millennial women and identifies knowledge gaps, requiring additional study. Second, the report presents a data-based profile of millennial women entrepreneurs in America utilizing data from the American Community Survey and the Survey of Business Owners and Self-Employed Persons. Finally, the conclusion posits further research questions with an eye towards developing action-oriented policy initiatives to assist millennial women in starting and growing businesses.

This report, in keeping with the mission of the Kogod Tax Policy Center (KTPC) to conduct non-partisan policy research on tax and compliance issues specific to small businesses and entrepreneurs, provides an initial assessment of how the Code’s tax expenditures targeted to help small businesses grow and access capital impact women-owned firms. The results are eye-opening.

Women’s importance to the U.S. business community is self-evident, and statistics like these help our understanding of their impact. As the only large-scale survey on business demographics, the Census Bureau’s Survey of Business Owners (SBO) provides an opportunity to evaluate women-owned businesses. Using the SBO data, this report analyzes the unique characteristics, current role, and opportunities for growth of women-owned businesses in the U.S. economy. Due to changes in the SBO’s survey methods, this report is primarily a snapshot of women-owned businesses in 2012.

One approach to understanding the interactions between the actors and processes that support segments of entrepreneurs, such as women entrepreneurs, is the application of an “entrepreneurial ecosystem” framework. NWBC’s entirely new ecosystem model serves as a tool to evaluate regional support of women’s entrepreneurship. The convergence of the domains on women-owned ventures, centrally displayed, demonstrates that actors throughout the ecosystem work together to engage, advise, and drive the growth of women entrepreneurs.

This research was commissioned by The National Women Business Council (NWBC) and prepared by A2F Consulting LLC to explore the distinct relationship between crowdfunding and women entrepreneurship and develop a deeper understanding of crowdfunding as a capital source. The research aims to: i) identify and document available demographic and other descriptive quantitative information on crowdfunding, including equity crowdfunding; ii) identify gender differences in crowdfunding in terms of industry, goals, investors, platforms used, and success; iii) document existing policies that may support or hinder women’s participation in crowdfunding campaigns; iv) provide additional information and guidance to women entrepreneurs seeking to raise capital through crowdfunding; and v) provide policy recommendations for supporting women entrepreneurs.

America’s SBDCs did a study – America’s Voice on Small Business – that delves into the entrepreneurial mindsets of different generations of Americans. The findings reinforced previously held beliefs such as a strong entrepreneurial inclination among millennials, while challenging preconceived notions about their motivations for starting a business. One third of Americans (34 percent), have worked in a small business and nearly a quarter (24 percent) of both millennials and GenXers own or have owned a small business.

The 2016 SBCS, which was fielded in Q3 and Q4 2016, yielded 10,303 responses from employer firms in 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report findings provide an in-depth look at small business performance and debt at the end of 2016.

Women-owned businesses are a significant and growing but underrepresented segment of the U.S. economy. In order for the United States, and its various regions, to reach full economic potential, policymakers need to be able to assess the mechanisms throughout their local economies that support women entrepreneurs and to effectively coordinate the variety of stakeholders that share the same goal.

The National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) commissioned research prepared by Washington CORE to strengthen stakeholder understanding of incubators and accelerators as they relate to women entrepreneurs and, ultimately, to facilitate the successful participation of women entrepreneurs in these programs. This research includes a literature review, as well as a direct exploration of the experiences and perspectives of women entrepreneurs and incubator and accelerator managers through survey and interview analysis.

Commissioned by the National Women’s Business Council and prepared by BD2, LLC and RTI International, On the Commercialization Path: Entrepreneurship and Intellectual Property Outputs among Women in Stem presents an examination of innovation among women in STEM fields by identifying gaps in their entrepreneurial outcomes and highlighting future opportunities for policy improvements.

AEO recently released “The Tapestry of Black Business Ownership in America: Untapped Opportunities for Success.” The report assesses the economic strength and potential of Black-owned businesses, identifies myths, challenges and opportunities across a mosaic of segments, and suggests a plan for how investors and policymakers can increase the effectiveness of programs designed to support Black entrepreneurship.

Commissioned by the National Women’s Business Council and prepared by Siri Terjesen, PhD, Social Entrepreneurship Amongst Women and Men in the United States uses brand new data on social entrepreneurship among men and women in the United States to confirm the message that women are successfully launching, leading, and growing social ventures across the country. In particular, this project gives an exciting “first look” at data from the 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, and reveals some pretty interesting trends about social enterprises. Learn what percentage of U.S. entrepreneurs report leading a social enterprise, how entrepreneurial motivations differ between men and women, and recommendations for why and how policymakers should support social enterprises.

With this report, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI) highlights key research findings from its third annual Survey of U.S. Latino Business Owners. In this survey, we examine issues specifically related to Latino entrepreneurs and Latino-owned businesses in the United States. This report expands upon existing studies, including the 2015 and 2016 State of Latino Entrepreneurship reports. We continue to investigate financing and the importance of growth for Latino businesses and conduct further analysis on the role of national banks.

Fiscal year 2016 was a milestone in the Office of Advocacy’s history, signaling 40 years since the office’s founding. Today, the SBA Office of Advocacy released its annual report, Report on the Regulatory Flexibility Act, FY 2016. The report analyzes federal agency compliance with the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA), as well as with provisions of the Small Business JOBS Act of 2010 and Executive Order 13272, “Proper Consideration of Small Entities in Federal Rulemaking.”

The US SBA’s Office of Advocacy released “Explaining the Emergence of the Immigrant Entrepreneur.” This report found an explanation for the growth in the number of immigrant entrepreneurs. Put simply, age is related to self-employment, and immigrants are getting older. In addition, as the native-born Baby Boomers age and retire, the number of self-employed will decline.

PPIC published “Immigrants in California.” Our state is home to more than 10 million immigrants-about a quarter of the nation’s foreign-born population. The state economy increasingly depends on immigrants to meet demand for highly educated workers, but it also continues to rely on immigrants with little formal education.

During 2016, Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) convened an Employer-Based Small Dollar Loan Knowledge Network (Knowledge Network) of nine diverse mission-driven lenders offering employer-based small dollar loan products. OFN managed the Knowledge Network with the support of The Prudential Foundation and the valuable insights of two Knowledge Partners, Center for Financial Services Innovation and the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions. Through monthly conversations including online and in-person meetings, the Knowledge Network participants shared strategies and learned about common challenges. This paper details learnings from the Knowledge Network’s discussions, organized in six areas: Marketing, Outreach, and Employer Engagement; Customer Experience; Technology; Financial Counseling; Impact and Outcomes; and Partnerships.

African Americans & Latinos/as face high barriers to starting and growing businesses, including lower levels of financial assets. What steps can we take to address this?

CFED released “Administrative Actions to Close the Ever-Growing Gap.” This document describes seven administrative policy proposals President Trump could take that would help solve the problems of financial insecurity, wealth inequality and the growing racial wealth divide.

Small nonemployer businesses—those with no employees other than the firms’ owners—make up nearly 80% of all U.S. firms in number. Yet, little is known about the performance or the financing needs and decisions of these 23 million businesses. The few sources that provide insight into small business credit conditions do not distinguish the experiences of nonemployers from small employer firms, which may differ significantly.

This study, which was commissioned by Upwork, the world’s largest freelancing marketplace, places the IW in context by examining the economic drivers, impacts, and facts around the growth of work performed by self-employed professionals and other freelance businesses. To more fully understand the IW and provide informed judgments about the wisdom of policy reforms that may affect freelancers and their economic opportunities, this study analyzed two distinct data sources and reviewed the related literature. The primary data sources are the 2014 and 2015 Freelancing in America (“FIA”) survey of American workers co-sponsored by Freelancers Union and Upwork, and the 2015 transactions between buyers and sellers using Upwork’s website.

The growing prevalence of alternative work arrangements has accelerated with the rapidly evolving digital platform transformations in local and global markets (Kenny and Zysman, 2015 and 2016). Although traditional (offline) informal paid work has always been a part of the labor sector (BLS-Contingent Worker Survey, 2005; GAO, 2015 and Katz and Krueger, 2016), the rise of online-enabled paid work activities requires new approaches to measure this growing trend (Farrell and Greig, 2016; Gray et al, 2016; Sundararajan, 2016 and Schor, 2015). In the fourth quarter of 2015, the Federal Reserve Board conducted a nationally representative survey of adults 18 and older to track online and offline income-generating activities as well as their employment status during the six months prior to the surveys. Survey results indicate that 36 percent of respondents undertook informal paid work activities either as a complement to or as a substitute for more traditional and formal work arrangements. We explore the rationale behind respondents’ participation in alternative work arrangements by setting questions that capture participant motives and attitudes towards informal offline and online paid work activities. Sixty-five percent of qualified survey respondents indicate that a main reason for participating in informal work is to earn extra income.

In a new paper, Philanthropy and the Future of Work: Dimensions of Change and Opportunities for Action, we address the challenges related to the future of work facing philanthropic leaders who are interested in connecting economically vulnerable individuals and families to opportunities for advancement through work. The paper draws from a series of interviews conducted with more than a dozen individuals in philanthropy, revealing their ideas on the future of work and the implications for their strategies.

Etsy is now forging new ground by lobbying for the economic security of its sellers. In a new report, the company points out the striking growth of the gig economy and calls for reforms to our current benefits system stating, “It’s time to start thinking bigger and reimagine a world that guarantees a social safety net to everyone who works, regardless of how they work.”

2016 is the third year we have conducted “Freelancing in America” – the most comprehensive measure of the U.S. independent workforce available. Going into this year’s survey, we already knew that millions of Americans today are choosing to be part of the independent workforce, driven by freedom and flexibility. Moreover, technology is making it easier to find freelance work, making freelancing an increasingly popular way to work and live.

The SBA’s Office of Advocacy has a new report – The Arrival of the Immigrant Entrepreneur. Over the last 20 years, the role of immigrant entrepreneurs has grown. The percentage of the self-employed who were born abroad more than doubled between 1994 and 2015, growing from 8.6 percent to 19.5 percent. This report shows that the growth was caused by three changes — an increase in the size of the population born abroad, an increase in self-employment among those born abroad, and a decrease in self-employment overall.

The number of women-owned businesses is rapidly growing. Amidst these increases, Black women have become one of the fastest growing segments of entrepreneurs in the country. This work explores the many challenges and opportunities faced by Black women entrepreneurs.

Civic Economics new report – Amazon and Empty Storefronts – looks at two broad classes of impact: Fiscal (relating to public revenue) and Land Use (relating to development patterns at the local level).

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance issued a new report that suggests a troubling explanation for the dwindling ranks of small businesses. “Drawing on examples in pharmacy, banking, telecommunications, and retail, it finds that big companies routinely use their size and their economic and political power to undermine their smaller rivals and exclude them from markets.”

Check out the Fast Facts on California Economy published by the Assembly Committee on Jobs, Economic Development and the Economy (JEDE). The state has the 6th largest economy in the world with a $2.45 trillion GDP, July 2016.

The Finance FAQ outlines the borrowing and lending universe for startups and existing small businesses, provides demographic information, and touches on important trends in the amount and modes of finance.

The SBA Office of Advocacy has updated its most widely used publication: “Frequently Asked Questions about Small Business.” The Small Business FAQ is the place to go to for the basics – how many small businesses are in the United States, how many employees they have, and what their growth trends are.

Asset Funders Network recently published “Prison to Proprietor: Entrepreneurship as a Re-Entry Strategy.” The report features several programs that use business ownership to build skills, connections, and attitudes that strengthen the ability of formerly-incarcerated individuals to succeed as they re-enter their communities. Such programs improve chances of employment, reduce recidivism and benefit both the individual and the community. The expansion of business ownership and entrepreneurship opportunities may particularly benefit people and communities of color who are disproportionately affected by incarceration.

Opportunity Fund released a very important research report, “Unaffordable and Unsustainable: The New Business Lending on Main Street.” Until now, we have been relying on stories to explain what’s happening with online lending. Now we’ve got some data on the loans and cash advances being offered to small businesses by short-term, high-cost alternative lenders. Cliff notes on findings: 94% interest rates; average payment is 1.78x income -YIKES.

This research is an analysis of the key trends and findings in women’s business ownership, comparing figures from the 2002, 2007, and 2012 Surveys of Business Owners. The project explores the growth and development of women-owned enterprises over the 2002 to 2012 period, paying particular attention to differences between the pre-recession period of 2002-2007 and the more recent 2007-2012 period.

Seven Federal Reserve Banks released Small Business Credit Survey: Report on Employer Firms. The three main findings: financing success improved in 2015; businesses most satisfied with small bank lending; and online lenders are popular—but they have lowest borrower satisfaction levels.

For centuries, the cost of distance has determined where businesses produce and sell, where employers locate jobs and where families choose to live, work, shop, and play. What if this cost fell dramatically, thanks to new technologies? How would the global economy change if manufacturers could produce locally in small batches, without incurring excess cost? Would existing business models and supply chains, for instance, suddenly become uncompetitive? If people could work from anywhere, would crowded neighborhoods start to thin out? That change already has begun in the world’s advanced economies and is gathering momentum. Over the next two decades, the cost of distance will decline sharply, according to Bain research, altering the way we live and work—faster than most people expect and more broadly than many imagine.

With this report, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI) shares research from its 2016 Survey of U.S. Latino Business Owners. By examining issues specifically related to Latino entrepreneurs and the state of Latino-owned businesses, this report expands upon existing studies, including the 2015 State of the Latino Entrepreneurship report. Our data comes from a new, unique survey on U.S.-based Latino entrepreneurs meant to supplement and extend data available through the Kauffman Foundation and U.S. Census Bureau. The report and data provide academic researchers, policymakers, and business leaders with insights into U.S. Latino-owned businesses and the barriers they face to economic success.

Entrepreneurship is lower among Millennials than among prior generations. In 2014, less than 2 percent of Millennials reported self-employment, compared with 7.6 percent for Generation X and 8.3 percent for Baby Boomers. These differences largely reflect the youth of Millennials and the positive relationship between age and entrepreneurship among the relatively young. However, growth with age in the proportion of each generation reporting self-employment has been slower for Millennials than for prior generations. At age 30, less than 4 percent of Millennials reported self-employment in their primary job in the previous year, compared with 5.4 percent for Generation X and 6.7 percent for Baby Boomers. Trends among the age groups Millennials will join in future years suggest that entrepreneurship among Millennials will remain relatively low for decades.

One of the Council’s key areas of research is on women’s access to capital, a continual challenge for women entrepreneurs. Two of the NWBC’s FY2013 research projects demonstrate that accessing sufficient capital is a problem even for high-growth women-owned businesses. We have learned that women-owned firms face unique challenges because there are significant differences in undercapitalization that exist between men-owned and women-owned firms. First, Robb and Coleman concluded that startup capital is a key indicator of business success. This research confirmed that women start their business with nearly half the amount of capital as men, and further that women entrepreneurs raise substantially less equity and debt throughout the business lifecycle. In a second study, conducted by PQC Consulting, Inc, we learned, that all else equal, undercapitalization negatively impacts business survival.

The DBO on Dec. 11, 2015, launched an inquiry into the so-called online, or alternative, lending sector. The inquiry’s objective is to determine whether market participants are fully complying with state lending and securities laws. It also aims to assess how the state’s regulatory regime is working, and should work, with respect to the industry.

This Annual Report is a synthesis of the Council’s commitment to supporting women in business by producing best-in-class, actionable research on the most relevant issues facing aspiring and current women business owners and leaders, and identifying – through research and engagement – the unique barriers and challenges of women in pursuit of business.

This study examines the financial success, measured by income and net worth, of households headed by military veterans. The study focuses on comparisons of income and net worth for three groups: (1) veterans and non-veteran households; (2) veterans households with and without small business, and (3) veteran and non-veteran small business households.

Read FIELD’s new report Microbusinesses, Gainful Jobs. They found that workers value the flexibility, fulfillment, and skill-building opportunities offered by their microbusiness jobs and 63% of respondents made wages at or above President Obama’s proposed increase to the minimum wage. They also found out that there’s a 1-5 cost-benefit ratio for micro business development (for every $1 of grant money spent on microbusiness development, $5 is created in economic activity) and microbusinesses create opportunity for those that struggle the most.

Best Cities for Minorities: Gauging the Economics of Opportunity By Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism First published May 2015 This study provides an initial analysis of African-American, Latino and Asian economic and …

In collaboration with the SBA Office of Women’s Business Ownership, the Council worked with Carnegie Mellon University to review and analyze the effectiveness of Women’s Business Centers. Our hope was to gain an understanding of the Women’s Business Center network, what they need and how we can best support them. Download the report here and read our findings and recommendations for how best to support WBC’s.

 Joyce Klein of Aspen Institute’s FIELD program writes how impact investments can be used to scale microlending. The essay appears in a larger publication – Bottom Line – that addresses how impact investment can improve economic mobility in the U.S.

Since 2010, the Federal Reserve has been monitoring small business credit conditions through regional surveys of business owners. In 2014, the Federal Reserve Banks of New York, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Philadelphia collaborated on a common small business credit survey to cover much of the eastern region of the U.S. The survey offers insight about the quality and pace of the sector’s recovery by providing evidence on credit conditions from the perspective of borrowers.

The Bottom Line: Investing for Impact on Economic Mobility in the U.S. draws on the lessons from market-based approaches to identify tools and strategies that can help move the needle on family economic security.

A quick run down of the ways that student debt and entrepreneurship interact.

The Council commissioned research on sole proprietorships and the factors leading to these firms’ first hires. The purpose was to discover how to best support the employment growth of microbusinesses.

This report examines factors affecting access to capital for high growth women-owned or women-led firms. Prior research suggests that significant gender differences in firm employment, size, and growth rates persist (Bitler et al., 2001; Fairlie & Robb, 2009; Coleman & Robb, 2009). Data from the United States Census Bureau indicate that less than 30% of businesses are owned by women and only 12% of those firms employ anyone other than the business owner are herself. Only 2 percent have 10 or more employees. Census data indicate women-owned employer firms make up just 16% of employer firms and that only 2 percent of women-owned firms in the United States have revenues in excess of $1 million. (2007 Survey of Business).

Women entrepreneurs still face challenges getting fair access to capital. Only 4 percent of the total dollar value of all small business loans goes to women entrepreneurs. The report proposes expanding microloans and makes SBA’s Intermediary Loan Program permanent to provide more capital to women entrepreneurs.

Women are an important force in America who have, for too long, been undervalued and underrepresented in political leadership and policy making. Our multi-decade march into the American workforce, business ownership, household leadership and consumer spending has elevated women into true leadership of the American economy. The purpose of this report is to highlight the contributions of women to America, outline our current economic condition and state clearly the types of federal budget and policies that are vital to support Women’s Economic Priorities.

Title I‐B funds, available nationwide under the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), provide critical funding to help low‐income youth, unemployed adults and dislocated workers enter and reenter the workforce. WIA programs contribute toward a better educated and trained workforce capable of adding value to the economy’s output. This report examines the various ways WIA Title I‐B resources in Washington are used to empower job seekers by making good decisions about training and job placement. Those interested in self‐employment are among those who seek out WIA counseling, referral, and training services. This report particularly focuses on the ways that WIA resources are being used in Washington to help aspiring entrepreneurs access the information and services they need to succeed with self‐employment. Observations and findings presented in this report are based on interviews with Workforce Development Council staff and directors in the state’s 12 Workforce Development Areas. Employment Security Department staff helped supply the WIA Title I‐B program expenditure and participant data presented in the report.

The latest report from CFED looks at how micro-businesses manage their finances, the major financial challenges they face, and which components of financial capability help them succeed.

The SBA’s Women’s Business Center (WBC) Program supports 106 nonprofit organizations that provide business training and counseling to female entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs, which includes women in underserved communities. The program is supported by the Small Business Administration and matched by donations.

The California Reinvestment Coalition’s (CRC) 2010 economic development report documented a dramatic two-thirds plunge in critical bank lending to California small businesses between 2007 and 2009; businesses that are universally seen as the engine of economic recovery. This report unveils the appalling continuing reality that today’s bank lending to small businesses shows only the barest improvement since 2009.

This report examines growth trends for small and micro businesses in recent years, the sector’s need for liability protection to increase revenue and retain customers, and the role insurance advisors can play in facilitating micro business growth.

As it did in 2012, the Summit is tapping into California’s most vital resource—its people—to identify shared problems and to develop a shared agenda that will lay the foundation for a future of well-paying jobs, a sustainable environment, and equal opportunities for every Californian.

Etsy is an online marketplace where artists and collectors sell their handmade goods, vintage items and craft supplies. Founded in June 2005, Etsy now includes more than 20 million products and over one million sellers worldwide. In the last year alone, they generated over $895 million in sales. A survey of 5,500 U.S. sellers reveals a unique population of Internet-enabled entrepreneurs who are building businesses on their own terms — prioritizing flexibility and independence over rapid growth, and using Etsy income to build resilience in the face of declining job security.

The National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) initiated this research to understand the reasons behind the general lag of women-owned business growth in terms of business size and receipts, as compared to firms owned by men.  Other studies have indicated that, on the whole, women and men approach entrepreneurship differently.  In order to assist women, and the nation, to advance economically, the NWBC looked to the research to provide insights on key considerations when reaching out to women entrepreneurs to encourage maximum growth of their businesses.  The research centered on questions about three key attitudinal areas associated with business ownership and growth: risk tolerance, motivations, and expectations.  The research team also listened for instances where culture could be influencing behaviors or experiences.

This case study is a detailed analysis of one community-based organization’s approach to creating a bundled service delivery model, with a particular focus on the set of services and systems targeted at entrepreneurs. This case study is intended to be a resource that captures and shares many of the lessons from CFED’s partnership with MEDA that convey the most efficient ways to deliver bundled services to entrepreneurs. This study is designed for anyone interested in establishing an integrated approach for serving entrepreneurs with a range of services in an intentional and coordinated way, including community-based organizations, community leaders and practitioners, financial institutions, municipal or state agencies, microenterprise development organizations and other organizations that serve entrepreneurs and their families.

Community affairs offices at the Board and Reserve Banks engage in a wide variety of activities to help financial institutions, community-based organizations, government entities, and the public understand and address financial services issues that affect low- and moderate-income people and geographic regions.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland sponsored an online survey of small businesses, which was conducted from July 1 through August 15, 2013. The survey included questions about business conditions, financing, and workforce needs.

Anil Rupasingha, PhD Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Local entrepreneurship matters for local economic performance and smaller local businesses are more important than larger local businesses for local economic performance.

Cesare Fracassi and Shimon Kogan, UT Austin; Mark Garmaise, UCLA Anderson; Gabriel Natividad, NYU Stern A team of researchers digs into five years worth of lending data from Accion Texas and reports that startup small businesses that receive a microloan are dramatically more likely to survive, enjoy higher revenues and create more jobs.

Microenterprise development organizations (MDOs) are adept at doing more with less. Compelled by the drive to serve larger numbers of aspiring entrepreneurs amid a tighter funding environment, many are, not surprisingly, looking more closely at distance learning. Both urban and rural programs have grown geographically by establishing branch or regional offices wherever potential clients work and reside in numbers. But, the costs and organizational impact can be high, leading MDOs, especially those focused on training and technical assistance, to explore virtual alternatives.

Women play a central role in rebuilding the middle class and keeping our economy growing. As women continue to start businesses in this country, it is imperative they have the right tools to be successful. But do they? Business and Professional Women’s (BPW) Foundation began to explore this question by conducting a brief poll among women small business owners.

Green market opportunities and operating practices should matter to owners of the smallest businesses. As this report makes clear, that’s not just for ethical reasons. Our work – including a national survey of more than 1,300 business owners – reveals a compelling business case for green.

The primary focus of our analysis was to evaluate the impact of the WOSB FCP on the participation of and awards granted to women-owned small businesses. Of principal interest was whether WOSBs are meeting procurement thresholds of 5 percent (in both contract number and dollar amount) of total Federal prime contracting awards since the implementation of the WOSB FCP rules in 2011.

In its latest infographic, ‘Women in Business: 2007 – 2010’, the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) builds off its previous analysis in the 2012 annual report to track the performance outcomes of approximately 98% of employer establishments identified in the 2007 Survey of Business Owners.  Using the data sources available to the Census Bureau, NWBC and the Census Bureau have tracked the expansions and contractions in employment, as well as the closing or sale of businesses, through 2010.  This is the most recent government data available on women business owners.

Does microenterprise have an impact on the local economy? Drawing on nearly 25 years of experience and five years of data collected from 753 clients, Women’s Initiative examined the impact of our program on the local economy through increased sales, income, jobs, and sales tax. We found that, even as economic recovery and job growth remained weak in the U.S., our clients – the low-income, high potential women we serve – multiplied their annual gross revenue more than thirteenfold within the first 18 months after training, and in 2012 alone, our clients provided 2,313 jobs for others through their businesses. Including the jobs that they created for themselves, this amounted to a total of 5,317 local jobs created and retained in 2012. The findings in this report indicate that our program has had a significant impact on the local economy. For every $1 invested in our program, $30 was returned to the local economy within 18 months after training. Moreover, this return on investment accumulated each year as clients’ businesses continued to thrive. Five years after training, the return on investment reached $108 for every $1 invested in our program, demonstrating that an investment in microenterprise has a powerful and sustainable economic impact on the community as well as on the individual entrepreneurs.

During the summer of 2011, the United States participated in the 13th annual cycle of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) research. Across the globe, 54 economies participated in the survey, spanning diverse geographies and a range of development levels. In the United States over 5,800 adults between the ages of 18 and 99 were interviewed.

The GEM study is uniquely positioned to advance understanding about entrepreneurship and facilitate decisions and initiatives that promote these endeavours. Each year, GEM provides a broad array of data on societal attitudes, participation levels of individuals at different stages of the entrepreneurship process and the characteristics of entrepreneurs and their businesses. This information can enable comparisons within and across individual economies, geographic regions, and economic development levels.

The State of Entrepreneurship in Portland reviews the current environment for entrepreneurship in Portland and defines an action plan to complement the City’s target industry cluster and neighborhood economic development strategies and catalytic redevelopment efforts.

ILSR’s annual survey has found that independent businesses experienced solid revenue growth in 2012, buoyed in part by “buy local first” initiatives.

A solid review of several foundational studies on the costs and benefits to cities of locally-owned businesses versus larger chain stores from Civic Economics.

By all measures 2012 has been a year of opportunity and challenge, both abroad and on our shores. It was a year that brought with it many important issues: uncertainty in the world economy, volatility in financial markets, unrest in multiple areas of the world, a much anticipated election cycle here in the United States, and a potential fiscal cliff that remains daunting for many business owners and entrepreneurs. For the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC), this environment was one from which to learn, and in which to take a leadership role to help increase the economic participation of women entrepreneurs.

In periods of full employment, a healthy employment growth rate would be one that simply matches the growth rate of the labor force. But, contrary to assumptions often made by economists and policymakers, full employment is the exception rather than the rule in the U.S. labor market. An implicit message of this chapter is that ensuring healthy job growth requires an active macroeconomic policy that targets growth in aggregate demand sufficient to meet the growing supply of potential workers.

Entrepreneurs – including business, civic and social entrepreneurs, are central to bringing about fundamental change and innovation enabling local, regional and national recovery and longer-term prosperity. This paper explores entrepreneurial talent emerging from the Great Recession.

How did the financial crisis that began in 2008 affect credit markets in the U.S.? Anecdotal evidence suggested that small businesses, which largely rely upon banks for credit, were especially hard hit. In this study, the SBA analyzes data on small-business lending collected by U.S. banking regulators to provide new evidence on how bank credit, in general, and bank credit to small businesses, in particular, were affected by the financial crisis.

This study finds that the Bay Area enjoys unique economic assets that have enabled it to prosper across economic cycles. It finds that a strategic focus on the sectors where it is most competitive and which have defined its global leadership offers the best opportunity to generate future jobs and growth. It also finds growing economic inequality, and a risk that significant parts of the population won’t share in the region’s general economic success.

This second part to the NWBC research project, Intellectual Property and Women Entrepreneurs, covers the qualitative research from the original report and centers on six focus groups with women entrepreneurs and business women. The focus groups were conducted in different parts of the nation. Two of these focus groups were with women who had successfully obtained a patent or trademark, two were with women who had applied for but did not receive a patent or trademark and the remaining two groups were with women who had never applied for a patent or trademark.