Using confidential microdata from the Characteristics of Business Owners survey, we examine why African American-owned businesses lag substantially behind white-owned businesses in sales, profits, employment, and survival. Black business owners are much less likely than white owners to have had...

Four decades ago, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan made the argument that the black family was not strong enough to create those extended clans that elsewhere were most helpful for businessmen and professionals. Using data from the confidential and restricted access Characteristics of...