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....

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...