Small firms are often seen to be the engines of growth. There are two main sources of empirical evidence that are adduced to support this conclusion. The first is that job creation has been coming mainly from small firms. The second is that the share of employment accounted for by small firms has increased in the past two decades. Both of these sources rely on a simple metric--employment. This ...

The extent to which market imperfections or institutional distortions amplify business cycle fluctuations is controversial. Competitive real-business-cycle models (for example, Kydland and Prescott 1982, Hansen 1985) imply that these factors play a secondary role. Other types of model imply that market imperfections can have a significant, adverse effect on welfare. In particular, Bernanke and ...

The cost of health insurance has been the primary concern of small business owners for several decades. State small group health insurance reforms, implemented in the 1990s, aimed to control the variability of health insurance premiums and to improve access to health insurance. Small group reforms only affected firms within a specific size range, and the definition of the upper size threshold f...

This report was developed under a contract with the Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy, and contains information and analysis that was reviewed and edited by officials of the Office of Advocacy. However, the final conclusions of the report do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Advocacy. Advocacy: the voice of small business in government ww w.sba.gov/advo This con...

The US industrial sector displays heterogeneity among firms on the basis of their size: smaller firms exhibit a higher profit rate, lower survival probability and difficulty in accessing the capital market. A simple theoretical model that generates these features based on private information regarding managerial actions at firm-level production is developed and tested. Using a large panel of pu...

OBJECTIVES To assess the likely effects of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act (HIPAA), based on small firms' experiences under state small group insurance reforms that were similar in design to HIPAA. METHODS Data on 17,818 small businesses (range, 2-50 employees) nationwide from the 1994 National Employer Health Insurance Survey were analyzed to examine the effects o...

We have used data on patents and publications, and from an Internet-based survey, to analyse corporate technological activities in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. Two distinct clusters of firms exist: large firms mainly in telecommunications, desktop computing, and consumer electronics; and small firms specialising in speech technologies. T...

This study examines the effects of information technology (IT) knowledge and media selection on operational performance, measured by balanced scorecard, in small firms. Small firms generally lag behind medium and large companies in adopting and implementing computerization. This study is based on a survey of 698 small firms. The results show that: (1) individual IT knowledge and both traditiona...

The research in this paper empirically explores the importance of small businesses in fostering economic growth. We develop a unique data set for Houston, Texas that contains observations of over 63,000 individual firms and that has employee counts as well as location information matched to census data. The paper estimates two core urban models, bifurcated by large and small firms, examining ho...