Business survival rates across the urban–rural divide

Steven Deller () and Tessa Conroy

Community Development, 2017, vol. 48, issue 1, 67-85

Abstract: Scholars and practitioners have concluded that entrepreneurship and small business development is central to community economic development. Often times community members, including elected officials, are skeptical of the importance of new and small firms due to their seemingly high failure rate. In this study we use the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) database of US establishments survival rate of new firms in each US county. For each county, we identify the number of new firms born in each year and calculate their survival rate as the share of firms from each cohort still operating five years later. We then explore how survival rates change over a simple urban–rural spectrum from 1990 to 2007. As expected, survival rates vary significantly by birth year, and new businesses in rural communities tend to have higher survival rates than those in urban communities. We close the study with a discussion of specific policy options.

Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/15575330.2016.1246459 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:comdev:v:48:y:2017:i:1:p:67-85

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RCOD20

DOI: 10.1080/15575330.2016.1246459

Access Statistics for this article

Community Development is currently edited by John Green, Rhonda Phillips and Anne Heinze Silvis

More articles in Community Development from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().