This article explores a Census Bureau survey of the small business sector, the 1982 Characteristics of Business Owners survey, which contains information on both small businesses and the managers running them. A number of patterns are documented. For example, among small businesses of the same...

This paper develops a model of small business failure and sale that is motivated by recent evidence concerning how the failure and sale of small businesses vary with the age of the business and the tenure of the manager. This evidence motivates two key features of the model: a match between the...

The authors formalize a view of entrepreneurship in the spirit of Theordore W. Schultz. In this view, entrepreneurs are those individuals who respond to the opportunities for creating new products (and the like) that arise because of technological progress, for example. The theory has...

This paper identifies a number of patterns in the sales of products within firms and over time in the PC software industry. For example, the authors find that a firm's initial product tends to be its most successful. There is also some indication that a firm's initial product sells better than...

Despite the widespread belief that entrepreneurship is a key factor in economic development, there have been few attempts to develop formal models to analyze the phenomenon. This paper presents a model in which endogenous entrepreneurial activity is a key determinant of economic growth. The...

A common theme in the labor economics literature is that use of advanced technology in production requires a skilled and educated workforce. Using a new survey of production processes at U.S. manufacturing plants, we ask whether plants that employ advanced technology require a skilled workforce....

This paper studies a Census Bureau survey of the small business sector that contains information on business age, business size and other proxies for business quality, information, typically available on business data sets, as well as proxies for the quality of the manager of each business,...

The success of a business depends in part on whether or not the manager and the business make a good "fit" or "match." Success also depends upon characteristics of the business that are distinct from the manager, for example, the convenience of the business location to customers. Variations...

What is the force of attraction of cities? Leading explanations include the advantages of a con-centrated market and knowledge spillovers. This paper develops a model of firm location decisions in which it is possible to distinguish the importance of the concentrated-market motive from other...