Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses ─ Current Knowledge and Challenges

Start-ups and other entrepreneurial ventures make a significant contribution to the US economy, particularly in the tech sector, where they comprise some of the largest and most influential companies. Yet for every high-profile, high-growth company like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, many more fail. This enormous heterogeneity poses conceptual and measurement challenges for economists concerned with understanding their precise impact on economic growth.

Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses brings together economists and data analysts to discuss the most recent research covering three broad themes. The first chapters isolate high- and low-performing entrepreneurial ventures and analyze their roles in creating jobs and driving innovation and productivity. The next chapters turn the focus on specific challenges entrepreneurs face and how they have varied over time, including over business cycles. The final chapters explore core measurement issues, with a focus on new data projects under development that may improve our understanding of this dynamic part of the economy.

John Haltiwanger is a distinguished university professor of economics and the Dudley and Louisa Dillard Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and a research associate of the NBER. Erik Hurst is the V. Duane Rath Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a research associate of the NBER. Javier Miranda is a principal economist at the Center for Economic Studies at the US Census Bureau. Antoinette Schoar is the Michael Koerner ’49 Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a research associate and director of the Entrepreneuship Working Group at the NBER.
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