The stability of the American economy depends on the spirit of entrepreneurship that drives the creation of new businesses, jobs, and innovations. Yet launching and running a business can involve many challenges, and many efforts fail in their early years. These barriers to success threaten our...

Without making any bold claim of a “free lunch,” there is nonetheless a compelling case to be made that permanently exempting investments in start ups from any capital gains taxes for five years would come reasonably close. It would conservatively boost annual equity investment in start ups...

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 information on new businesses in the United States, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation...

Despite recent innovations in entrepreneurial finance, particularly at the early stage of business creation, many new and young companies continue to face hurdles to acquire capital.The Kauffman Foundation addressed current challenges and opportunities in financing entrepreneurial growth, a key...

This paper investigates the capital structure choices that firms make in their initial year of operation, using restricted-access data from the Kauffman Firm Survey. Contrary to many accounts of startup activity, the firms in our data rely heavily on external debt sources such as bank financing,...

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...

The Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS) dataset provides researchers with a unique opportunity to study a panel of new businesses from startup to sustainability, with longitudinal data centering on topics such as how businesses are financed; the products, services, and innovations these businesses possess...

The purpose of this document is to provide instructions to the KFS users regarding the proper use of the KFS multiply imputed data to draw statistically valid inferences in their works. Also, it describes the general framework of the imputation process

This article uses data from the Kauffman Firm Survey to explore, by gender, the relationship of start up capital for new firm performance in terms of assets, revenues, income, employment, and survival. Our results reveal that, consistent with prior research, women-owned firms start with smaller...

Using confidential and restricted-access microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that Asian-owned businesses are 16.9 percent less likely to close, 20.6 percent more likely to have profits of at least $10,000, and 27.2 percent more likely to hire employees than white-owned businesses in...