Small Business Programs, Innovation, and Growth: Estimating Policy Effects Using Comprehensive Firm-Level Panel Data

这个项目调查初创企业和年轻公司的成长，他们通常被认为是最重要的就业创造者，并评估成为一个行业中高增长生产力领导者的可能性。该项目提供了对创新和研发(R&A；D)、公司层面的劳动力和全要素生产率、公司生产率和业绩的分散度、高生产率进入者和低生产率进入者和在任者的增长以及表现不佳公司的离职率的直接衡量标准。该分析特别关注小企业管理局(SBA)7(A)和504贷款安排，提供了财政限制的重要性以及主要政府计划可能在多大程度上削弱这些限制的证据。研究结果将不仅揭示项目的直接影响，而且还将考虑对提高生产率的资源重新分配的间接影响。特别是，核心问题是，政策干预是促进生产性但资金受限的企业的增长，还是维持生产率低的企业，这些企业应该将其资源释放到更好的用途上。这一结果对美国经济的增长、创新和生产率具有政策含义。该项目依赖于新的概念、方法和数据来评估金融准入和小企业计划的影响。从概念上讲，该项目利用企业动力学模型来分析作为进入者和在位者实验的结果的创新，从而作为创造性破坏过程的一部分。一个基本的见解是，充分分配结果有助于揭示创新，因为试验提高了分散度，选择提高了偏度。实证方法包括基于面板匹配的可信识别策略和捕捉SBA贷款获取中的地理差异的工具变量。估计不仅包括生产率和创新措施的平均处理效应，还包括结果分布的其他时刻：总体分散度和偏度、最高百分位数的表现，以及通过分布中不同点处的增长和退出发挥作用的分配和选择效应。这些方法为评估政府干预对提高生产率的再分配的影响提供了一种原创性的方法。数据工作将SBA的行政数据与人口普查局关于所有美国雇主的通用数据联系起来。增加了来自商业登记、制造商普查和制造商年度调查的变量来衡量生产率。通过链接到新的企业家年度调查，可以直接衡量创新和研发努力。该项目的概念方法、识别策略、分析方法和数据开发应该对其他研究具有积极的外部性，包括对美国和世界各地的其他项目的评估。

This project investigates the growth of start-ups and young firms, which are generally believed to be the most important job-creators, and evaluates the probability of becoming a high-growth productivity leader in an industry. The project provides direct measures of innovation and research and development (R&D), firm-level labor and total factor productivity, the dispersion of firm productivity and performance, the growth of high- vs. low-productivity entrants and incumbents, and exit rates of under-performing firms. With a specific focus on the Small Business Administration (SBA) 7(a) and 504 loan facilities, the analysis provides evidence on the importance of financial constraints, and the degree to which they may be attenuated by major government programs. The results will shed light not only on direct program impacts but also consider the indirect effects on productivity-enhancing reallocation of resources. In particular the central issue as to whether the policy intervention promotes growth of productive but financially constrained businesses, or instead sustains low-productivity firms that should release their resources to superior uses. The results have policy implications for the growth, innovation, and productivity of the U.S. economy. The project relies on new concepts, methods, and data for estimating the effects of financial access and small business programs. Conceptually, the project draws on models of firm dynamics to analyze innovation as the result of experimentation by entrants and incumbents, thus as part of the creative destruction process. A fundamental insight is that the full distribution of outcomes is useful for revealing innovation, as experimentation raises dispersion and selection raises skewness. The empirical methods include a credible identification strategy based on panel-matching and instrumental variables capturing geographic variation in SBA loan access. Estimation includes not only average treatment effects for productivity and innovation measures but also other moments of the outcome distribution: overall dispersion and skewness, performance at top percentiles, and allocation and selection effects that work through growth and exit at different points in the distribution. The methods provide an original way to assess the impact of a government intervention on productivity-enhancing reallocation. The data work links SBA administrative data with Census Bureau universal data on all U.S. employers. Variables from the Business Register, Census of Manufacturers, and Annual Survey of Manufacturers are added to measure productivity. Linking to the new Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs permits direct measurement of innovation and R&D effort. The conceptual approach, identification strategy, methods of analysis, and data development of this project should have positive externalities for other research including the evaluation of other programs in the U.S. and around the world.