Showing posts with label entrepreurs in US. Show all posts
Showing posts with label entrepreurs in US. Show all posts

Sunday, March 6, 2011

06/03/2011: Kauffman survey of economics bloggers

Kauffman Foundation - non-partisan US-based research think tank studying the issues of entrepreneurship. It describes itself as: "dedicated to the idea that entrepreneurship and innovation drive economic growth". The foundation released their quarterly survey results for Q1 2011 on the opinions and policy positions held by the US-based top economics bloggers.

You can access the survey paper from here and believe me - IT IS WORTH READING!

Here are the highlights:
  • The survey was conducted in mid-January 2011 by soliciting input from top economics bloggers as ranked by Palgrave’s Econolog.net.
  • Economics bloggers are less pessimistic in their outlook on the U.S. economy than they were at the end of 2010, though 77% believe overall conditions are mixed, facing recession, or in recession.
  • "For an economy in which growth is the norm, 31% of respondents think that the U.S. economy is worse than official statistics indicate, and only 10% believe it is better".
  • When asked to describe the economy using five adjectives, "uncertain” remains the most frequently used term.
  • "Although the panel is largely non-partisan, a 3:1 majority of top economics bloggers believe the government is too involved in the economy."
  • The top policy recommendation is for the government to “reduce regulatory burdens and fees on new firm formation” and “approve trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama,” with 92% support. So free trade and lesser burden on business formation. "Promoting entrepreneurship is a consensus agenda among policymakers".
  • Only 32% agree with a policy of “subsidizing new firm formation with targeted spending and tax benefits,” with 68% disagreeing (24% strongly).
  • The alternative option to “reduce regulatory burdens and fees on new firm formation” is favored by 92% of respondents.
  • "Rather than recommending that the government get more involved in helping entrepreneurs, top economics bloggers recommend it simply do less to hinder them."
Now some most excitingly interesting charts:

First: how balanced / non-partisan the panel is:
Oh, sorry, yes, Americans do have some serious talent amongst the bloggers and they tend to come from all 3 sides of economics thinking: Left, Right and purely objective 'quantifiers'.

Another one for us, Europeans. Remember the hoopla surrounding the high-sounding principles, but bad economics (yes, the Congressional Budget Office analysis has proven it to be 'bad economics') of the Obama Healthcare bill? Here's the verdict of the economists:
Ouch: 55% say "Repeal" the beast, 71% say "Don't tax the benefits".

Now more goodies for us, Europeans - how do the US economists rank performance of the ECB?
No "A" marks for ECB, Average mark is solid "D". Only US Congress and the Wall Street score less than the Euro-guardian.

Fascinating results!

Monday, September 27, 2010

Economics 27/9/10: Some evidence on entrepreneurship from the US

An interesting study of proprietorship and entrepreneurship from the US used 19 years worth of data (1989-2007) from the Survey of Consumer Finances in the US, to addresses three questions:
  1. Are business owners generally more or less financially conservative than their non-business-owning counterparts?
  2. Do business owners accumulate more wealth?
  3. Do business owners hold a smaller share of their financial assets in risky stock holdings?

The study: BUSINESS OWNERS, FINANCIAL RISK, AND WEALTH by Tami Gurley-Calvez Bureau of Business and Economic Research Department of Economics College of Business and Economics West Virginia University (July 2010 (link) Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation)

The motivation for these questions is straightforward:
“If households that own businesses are investing more heavily in relatively safe assets, then policies that reduce financial risk (such as the availability of high-yield certificate of deposit accounts) might spur business ownership among high ability households with lower risk tolerances. Alternatively, business owners may not view their ventures as risky due to asymmetric information or perceptions of their projects. In this case, policies that facilitate the ability to assess the profitability of business ownership, such as a transparent patent process and systems of regulation and taxation, would be better suited for promoting growth in business ownership.”

Results indicate that business owners are

  • financially conservative based on borrowing and savings questions
  • but are more likely to be willing to assume above-average risk for financial gain,
  • consistent with other studies findings that entrepreneurs save more, business owners accumulate more wealth over time;
  • however, business owners and non-business owners invest similar shares of their financial portfolios in safe assets.

So business owners are more risk averse in their own business ventures, but are about as risk averse in terms of their investment portfolios allocations as the rest of us.

“Taken together, the results suggest that policies aimed at increasing business ownership should focus on helping households identify high-value business opportunities through transparent tax, legal, and regulatory systems. Efforts to reduce risk should focus on the business venture, such as full loss offsets, rather than focusing on reductions in other financial risks.”
(emphasis is mine).

Some interesting factoids that the study throws:
  • A massive 12.26% of US households own businesses.
  • Business owners are underrepresented in the lower income categories, making up about 3% and 5% of the lowest and second-lowest income quintiles, respectively.
  • At the upper end of the income distribution, business owners account for 18% of households in the 80th-90th percentile range and 37% of households in the 90th-100th percentile range.
  • Business owners comprise 2% of the lowest quarter of the wealth distribution and 43% of households in the 90th to 100th wealth percentile range.

But things are not changing much over time. Per authors: “These results are consistent with Gentry and Hubbard (2004) who report that entrepreneurs account for 11.5 percent of the population in 1989 using the same definition

This, however, is a function to some extent of the fact that business owners earn higher incomes and accumulate more wealth, meaning they are unlikely to stay in lower incomes/wealth percentiles even if they start from there.

“Business owners have higher mean and median income levels. The median income for business owners is $87,000, whereas the median for households not owning businesses is $42,000. Likewise, business owners have more assets and net worth overall and by income category. Business owners have a median net worth of $497,000, and non-business owners have a median net worth of $94,000. The difference is large but the ratio of median net worth for business owners to median net worth for non-business owners of 5.29 is lower than the 8.03 ratio calculated from Gentry and Hubbard (2004) using 1989 SCF data.”


So the last figure suggests that over time, the wealth gap with non-business owners is shrinking. Undoubtedly, a housing bubble helped here.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Economics 07/02/2010: Human Capital, Immigrants and Social safety Nets

A very interesting piece of research that tends to support my view that higher minimum wages and more extensive welfare nets / social services nets are acting to reduce overall levels of productivity amongst the immigrants.

One paper, published this week, titled Indian Entrepreneurial Success in the US, Canada and the UK, by Robert W. Fairlie - University of California, Santa Cruz, Harry Krashinsky - University of Toronto, Julie Zissimopoulos – RAND and Krishna B. Kumar – RAND (available here) takes a look at the differences in entrepreneurship (incidence and outcomes) and education amongst one large sub-group of immigrants to the US, UK and Canada. Having a culturally homogenous and relatively large group of immigrants allows the authors to set aside the need for measuring sending country attributes, thus improving substantially the accuracy of their results.

What they found is pretty interesting.

Indian immigrants in the US and other wealthy countries are successful in entrepreneurship. But how successful these entrepreneurs are once they reach different countries and encounter different social systems, and what are the sources of their success?

The study finds that “in the US Indian entrepreneurs have average business income that is substantially higher than the national average and is higher than any other immigrant group. High levels of education among Indian immigrants in the US are responsible for nearly half of the higher level of entrepreneurial earnings while industry differences explain an additional 10 percent. In Canada, Indian entrepreneurs have average earnings slightly below the national average but they are more likely to hire employees, as are their counterparts in the US and UK. The Indian educational advantage is smaller in Canada and the UK contributing less to their entrepreneurial success.”

Hmmm… why so, you might ask?

Immigrants are most likely to enter both the US and UK as ‘family sponsored.’ Since the 1960s U.S. immigration policy has strongly favored family reunification. The UK’s immigration policies over the past four decades have shifted towards emphasizing family reunification and employment. On the other hand, Canada's point-based system which awards immigration admission points based on education, language ability (English or French), years of experience in a managerial, professional or technical occupation, age, arranged employment in Canada, and other factors leads to more skilled immigrants compared to the US.

So far so good – Canada has longer lasting and much more selective immigration policies than the US and UK.

Because of the point-based system, in Canada, roughly half of all immigrants are admitted through employment-based preferences. In contrast, slightly more than 10 percent of immigrants in the US are admitted under this classification.

Again, sounds like Canada should be really the land of entrepreneurial and higher quality immigrants.

The related category of employment creation or investors who face minimum net worth and business experience requirements, and self-employed immigrants who must have relevant experience in occupations. A larger (but still relatively small – just 7%) share of immigrants in Canada are admitted under these policies than in the US (0.1%) and UK (2.4%).

So, ex-ante data analysis, it is pretty clear that “Canada's point-based immigration system results in a higher share of employment-based immigrants compared to the US and UK. On the other hand, the UK admits a much higher share of immigrants under its refugee and asylee programs than the US or Canada. All else equal, we would expect skill levels of immigrants to be the highest in Canada and the lowest in the UK.” (emphasis is mine)

In other words: the authors “find some evidence that the educational advantage of Asian immigrants compared to the national average is lower in the UK than in the US, [consistent with differences in immigration policies]. But, we also find that the educational advantage in the US is higher than it is in Canada, which runs counter to the greater emphasis of Canada's immigration policy on rewarding points for the general skill level of immigrants.”


Why? “A more generous redistribution system, more egalitarian earnings, and other institutional and structural factors, however, may make Canada less attractive to higher skilled immigrants such as Indian immigrants.”

Boy, this is some statement – especially considering the EU policies to achieve ‘Social’ economy – economy based on greater earnings equality, greater rights-based outcomes equalization and maintaining a very generous welfare and redistribution systems. And this is serious, folks. Canada, US and UK are much younger – demographically – societies than EU-core states. This means that in general, the EU has a much more acute need to import younger entrepreneurial talent and skills in order to pay even comparable welfare rates to those in Canada, US and UK. Let alone to afford a more generous system of benefits. The prospects of this happening are not that good, folks.


Let us get back to the study, though:

“We find that Indian entrepreneurs are much more successful than the national average in the US. Indian businesses also perform well in Canada and the UK, but the evidence is not as strong. In the US, Indian entrepreneurs earn 60 percent more than white entrepreneurs and have the highest average business income of any immigrant group.”

No, wait – income inequality is actually favoring ethnic minorities in the US? Without an EU-styled rights legislation that polices allocations of income to specific ethnic groups? Who would have thought that to be possible!

“Estimates from business-level data sources also indicate that Indian firms have higher profits, hire more employees, and have lower failure rates than the average for all U.S. firms.”

Ouch - higher profits = hire more workers + have lower failure rates? And all without help of SIPTU/ICTU/etc to protect the interests of workers and to curb profiteering? Who could have thought?


But what drives such astounding results?

“To explain to relative success of Indian entrepreneurs we focus on the role of human capital. ...We test the hypothesis that a highly-educated Indian entrepreneurial-force is responsible for their superior performance in business. Indian immigrants in all three countries have education levels that are higher than the national average, and in the US the education levels of Indian immigrants are particularly high relative to the entire population. In the US, 68 percent of Indian entrepreneurs have a college education which is twice the rate for whites or the national average. Some of the variation in the education of Indian immigrants across the US, Canada and UK is likely due to immigration policy. Another possibility is that the higher returns to education in the US result in a more selective immigrant pool in the US compared to Canada and the UK.”

Bu wait – ‘higher returns to education’ = greater income inequality between educated and non-educated. Again, who could have thought that this might be a good thing, especially for a ‘knowledge economy’?

“When we examine business income, we find large, positive effects of education in the US and Canada. We also find large positive effects of education on employment in Canada, but smaller positive effects in the UK. The findings for education imply that the relatively high levels of education among Indian entrepreneurs have a large effect on business performance at least in the US and Canada. Decomposition estimates provide exact estimates of the contribution of higher levels of education among Indian entrepreneurs to their higher business incomes and employment levels.

  • In the US, higher levels of education among Indian entrepreneurs result in a business income advantage of 21 log points, which represents 43.9 percent of the gap.
  • High levels of education also contribute substantially to why Indian entrepreneurs earn more in Canada (12.5 log points), but the difference is not as large as in the US.
  • “The combination of the larger education advantage held by Indian entrepreneurs and the larger return to education is responsible for the increased importance of education as an explanatory factor in the US compared to Canada.
  • “In contrast to these results, the smaller educational advantage and lower returns to education in the UK result in less explanatory power in the UK.”
But sectoral and cultural decompositions also matter: “Lower concentrations of Indian entrepreneurs in agriculture and construction, lower female share*, higher marriage rates, and favorable regional distributions also generally contribute to why Indian businesses perform better than white businesses or the national average.”

Again, give it a thought, folks. The above says that Indian entrepreneurs are so spectacularly successful in all three countries because they avoid investing in ‘losing’ sectors and regions. So where does it put state-led efforts to pump money into such ‘losing’ sectors as, for example, agriculture? And where does this leave Ireland’s ‘National Spatial Development Plans’ that reallocate cash to ‘losing’ regions/areas? In the category of ‘luxury goods’ – an affordable (in certain times) cost of keeping at bay social discontent amongst those who are falling behind?

And it also says that higher marriage rates are positively associated with higher returns to entrepreneurship. Who could have thought?


Some food for thought for our immigration policy bureaucrats and our national development authorities, then…



*[Aside - the issue of lower female share of entrepreneurship is, in my view, a simple statistical legacy. Women entrepreneurs tend to run businesses that are on average younger than those for men, hence, some increased risk in statistical measures. Over time, I would expect as female entrepreneurship gains fully similar footing in types of business, sources of financing etc as male entrepreneurship, this difference will disappear completely.]