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Identifying idiosyncrasies in small firm data: Understanding what’s behind the data driving small firm policy
What is an “employer” firm? Consider the following scenario: A tutoring business opens in late 2022, staffed only by the owner. In early 2023, after several months building a client list, she brings on a handful of college students to take on additional clients on a contract basis. In April 2024, the owner hires her first full-time, W2 employee. This person departs in early 2025, and she begins looking for a replacement. In May 2025, she hires another W2 employee. In
Tracy Cole
5 days ago
Understanding Small Firms: Complementing big data with financial diaries
Small firms with 1-20 workers make up the majority of employer firms in the US. But these businesses, especially those in low-income neighborhoods, are under-examined in existing research like large economic surveys. Here's why, and here's how the Small Firm Diaries proposes to help fill the gap.
Tracy Cole
Sep 4, 2025
Introducing the Small Firm Diaries USA
The Financial Access Initiative started conducting in-depth, diaries-style analyses on small firms in 2021, with studies in 7 countries....
Tracy Cole
Aug 27, 2025
A New Framework for Understanding Small Firms
We launched the Small Firm Diaries because after decades of work trying to help microenterprises to grow into small firms, there was...
Small Firm Diaries Team
Sep 9, 2024
WATCH: Plunging Into the Digital Economy, but Still Tied to Cash
The 2021 Global Index found that Covid has driven the growth of digital payments worldwide, including an increase in digital payments to merchants. How are these global trends playing out in our sample of small firms? In this video we created for Financial Inclusion Week, we sift through data to tell the story of businesses straddling the borderlands between the cash and digital economies. We look into the accounts and transactions of a handful of firms in Nigeria and Colom
Small Firm Diaries Team
Nov 2, 2022
Calculating Weekly Profit: If We Can, Should We?
In our last post we talked about the challenge of understanding both how volatile revenues and expenses are for small firms, but more...
Laura Freschi and Tim Ogden
Feb 2, 2022
The Consequences of Volatility for Small Firms
When, where, and why fluctuations in income and expenses matter This fall, when we began to dig into early data coming out of the Small...
Laura Freschi and Tim Ogden
Dec 22, 2021
WATCH: Small Firm Diaries and the 3 'I's at Financial Inclusion Week
As part of CFI's Financial Inclusion week, Tim Ogden and Jonathan Morduch discuss why they embarked on the Small Firm Diaries study. They...
Small Firm Diaries Team
Nov 11, 2021
WATCH: An Introduction to the Colombian and Ethiopian Firms in our Sample
In this video, which we made for the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) Annual Conference, we walk through summary...
Small Firm Diaries Team
Nov 9, 2021
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