High prevailing levels of criminal activity have numerous impacts on the viability of urban small businesses and the various impacts are not uniformly negative. It is the negative impacts, however, that are most often noted. Either the perception or reality of rampant crime can scare away...

This study empirically investigates Michael Porter’s hypothesis that urban minority neighborhoods offer attractive opportunities to household-oriented businesses, such as retail firms (1995). Our analysis compares the traits and performance of firms serving predominantly minority clients to...

Although minority and immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.S. have clearly chosen to concentrate in highly competitive low-profit retail and service lines of business clustered geographically in urban minority neighborhoods, their reasons for doing so are unclear. We investigate their motivations by...

High prevailing levels of criminal activity have numerous impacts on the viability of urban small businesses and the various impacts are not uniformly negative. It is the negative impacts, however, that are most often noted. Either the perception or reality of rampant crime can scare away...

Using data from the confidential and restricted-access Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) Survey, we provide some suggestive evidence on the causes of intergenerational links in business ownership and the related issue of how having a family business background affects small business...

Differences in financing patterns and financial characteristics between female- and male-owned firms are often attributed to imperfections in credit markets. However, these differences could arise for many reasons, such as differences in the characteristics and preferences of owners and firms....

Although entrepreneurial activity is an important part of a capitalist economy, data about U.S. businesses in their early years of operation have been extremely limited. As part of an effort to gather more data on new businesses in the United States, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (the...

The Kauffman Firm Survey is a panel study of 4,928 businesses founded in 2004 that are being tracked annually over their first eight years. The survey focuses on the nature of new business formation activity, characteristics of the strategy, offerings, and employment patterns of new businesses....