Here on the blog, we often talk about the plethora of data available on small firms and why some are useful, and others are not. But the common thread of all of our posts is that small firm data is omnipresent.

We're pleased to announce six upcoming early findings events, where we'll share an inside look into initial findings from the Small Firm Diaries USA study, and invite discussion about implications for policy, practice, and efforts to better support small firms and workers in the United States.

In our last blog post, we explored how employment numbers are recorded among U.S. firms at a single point each year—March 12—and how this approach fails to capture the volatility of employment among small firms with 1–20 workers. In today’s post, we use new data from the SFD USA sample to further illustrate this point.

When trying to better understand small firms, some of the most important questions center on employment and jobs: How many jobs do small firms create? What is the quality of those jobs - particularly in terms of stability and security? Much of what we know about small firms comes from federal data, but like any data source, there are very real constraints that inhibit the insight provided by the available data.