Entrepreneurship, Self-Employment and Business Data:An Introduction to Several Large, Nationally-RepresentativeDatasets

Only a few large, nationally-representative datasets include information on both the ownerand the business. We briefly describe several of the most respected and up-to-date sourcesof data on entrepreneurs, the self-employed, and small businesses. More informationincluding estimates of recent trends in business ownership and performance (e.g. survivalrates, sales, employment, payroll, profits and industry) from these datasets is contained inFairlie and Robb (2008)....