The Kauffman Index 2016: Main Street Entrepreneurship Metropolitan Area and City Trends

Abstract

The Kauffman Index of Main Street Entrepreneurship is a comprehensive indicator of small business activity in the United States, integrating high-quality sources of timely information into one composite indicator. The Index captures business activity in all industries and is based on both a nationally representative sample size of roughly 900,000 responses each year and on the universe of all employer businesses in the United States on a dataset covering approximately five million businesses. The focus here is on business owners based on a location, survival rates of firms, and established small businesses — employer firms five years old and older and with fewer than fifty employees. As such, we examine both the business owners and the businesses they own.Main Street entrepreneurship is an important aspect of the U.S. economy and society. Established small businesses make up almost 68 percent of all employer firms in the United States and are a source of local economic activity.This report represents trends in Main Street entrepreneurship activity of the past two decades for the forty largest metropolitan areas in the United States by population. Two separate reports look at these same trends in all fifty states and at the national level. Some Main Street Entrepreneurship Index components, when available, also are reported by demographic groups.