New York Fed EHIs Reveal Small Business Struggles

Will Aarons and Asani Sarkar

No 20260203b, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: The New York Fed’s Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs) aim to study macroeconomic outcomes experienced by various groups of people and businesses. We recently added a suite of indicators describing the performance of small businesses to the EHIs—both for the region (defined, for the purpose of this study, as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) and nationally. Small businesses are critical to employment generation as they accounted for almost 63 percent of new private sector jobs since 2005 and employed almost 46 percent of all U.S. workers in 2025. Thus, understanding economic trends and impacts for small businesses is important for designing effective monetary policy and aligns with the New York Fed’s mission to support the regional economy. In this post, we highlight some aspects of small business profitability, revenues, employment, and indebtedness since 2019 for firms of different sizes.

Keywords: small business; performance; Second District (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G0 G30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-02-03
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DOI: 10.59576/lse.20260203b

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