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Successful Practices for Women Entrepreneurship Programs

The National Women’s Business Council (NWBC)  released a report which analyzes successful practices of entrepreneurship programs serving women students and offers tips to educational institutions looking to expand their programs for current and future women entrepreneurs. The two-part report, Successful Practices for Establishing and Modifying Entrepreneurship Programs for Women, reflects the Council’s commitment to increasing access to educational opportunities for women business owners.

Policy Priorities of Women Business Owners

On April 29, 2009, a town hall meeting of women business owners was held in Atlanta at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Student Center. Hosted and facilitated by the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC), this meeting was the seventh in a series of meetings that began in March 2007. NWBC designed these conversations to generate grassroots‐level recommendations from women business owners for the ultimate consideration of the President, Congress, and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).

Do Enterprise Zones Create Jobs?

In this Public Policy Institute of California report, the authors assess the degree to which the state’s largest economic development program has met its most important goal: creating employment.

Tiny Business Creates Large Change

The real heart of job growth in the small business community is businesses with fewer than five employees. Addressing the needs of this segment can generate profound positive economic and social consequences.

Mexican-American Self-Employment

This paper analyzes causes of the low self-employment rate among Mexican-Americans by studying self-employment entry and exits. Importantly, the authors analyze self-employment by recognizing heterogeneity in business ownership across industries and show that a classification of firms by human and financial capital “intensiveness”, or entry barriers, is effective in explaining differences in entrepreneurship across ethnic groups.

Minority Women Businesses Growing Fast

The Center for Women’s Business Research found that businesses owned by African American, Asian, and Hispanic women business owners substantially outpace all U.S. firms in the growth of revenues and number of employees.

Local Economic Development Policy Impacts

This study analyzes the relationship between local economic development policy and economic growth in a data set of 412 U.S. cities. Local government leaders in the U.S. employ a multitude of programs and policies in the name of economic development. The past few decades have seen a surge in local economic development policies, yet research analyzing their effectiveness is sparse.

Contributions of Women-Led Businesses

The economic impact of women business owners has long gone understated, according to a new two-part study released by the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) today. Based on custom datasets from the Census Bureau’s 2002 Survey of Business Owners and Self-Employed Persons (SBO), the reports assess the economic impact of women-owned and women-led firms on the U.S. economy by examining their receipts, compensation, geography, industry, and ethnography. The 2002 SBO is the most current information available on the distribution and contribution of women-led businesses.

NWBC Town Hall Meetings

In March and June 2007, the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) held town hall meetings with women business owners in St. Louis, Missouri and in Portland, Oregon. The objective of the meetings was to collect viewpoints and ideas from women business owners that could inform the Council’s policy positions and their future recommendations to government leaders.

Hispanic Self-Employment Entry

This article examines causes of the low self-employment rates among Mexican-Hispanics by studying self-employment entry. The data show that Mexican-Hispanics are less likely to be self-employed or enter self-employment, relative to non-Hispanic whites. Also, the lower self-employment entry rates among Mexican-Hispanics are due to lower entry rates into business ownership of firms in relatively high-barrier industries. In fact, Hispanics are more likely to start up a business in a low-barrier industry than whites.