About Scott Shane
Authored 28 articles.
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The Downside of Encouraging Small Business Owners to Tap Home Equity
Features, June 16, 2015
The housing bust has adversely affected small business access to credit. Declining home values have made it more difficult for small business owners to use the equity in their homes to finance their companies. In response, some small business advocates have proposed making it easier for small business owners to tap home equity as a source of business capital. But that might not be wise public policy.
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Protecting Small Business Intellectual Property
Features, February 11, 2015
Despite the argument made by some small business advocates that intellectual property (IP) “is the backbone of America’s innovative small businesses,” small companies are less likely than large ones to believe that legal forms of intellectual property (IP) protection are important to their operations, a National Science Foundation (NSF) survey of U.S. companies reveals.
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Five Recommendations for Pitching Investors
Features, January 07, 2015
Recently, I have seen a lot of pitches by entrepreneurs looking for money. As I have read through their emails, listened to their elevator pitches, and stared at their power point decks, I have become convinced of the following: Most entrepreneurs do a lousy job of pitching investors. Five mistakes occur so often that I feel compelled to offer suggestions on how to avoid them.
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How Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Differs at Big and Small Businesses
Features, January 06, 2015
Many people are aware that big companies are much more likely than small businesses to offer employer-sponsored health insurance to their employees. The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), an annual effort to query nearly 40,000 establishments, conducted by the Federal Government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality shows that only 34.8 percent of private sector establishments with fewer than 50 employees provi
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Why Do Entrepreneurs Prefer to Start Companies Rather Than Buy Them?
Features, December 19, 2014
Would-be entrepreneurs favor starting their own businesses to taking over companies already in operation.
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Why Are Fewer Small Business Owners Feeling Successful?
Features, November 17, 2014
Fewer small business owners perceive themselves as successful now than did at the start of the economic recovery, a Wells Fargo-Gallup survey of a representative sample of 601 small business owners reveals. In 2009, 43 percent of small business owners reported feeling “extremely” or “very successful as a small-business owner.” By 2014 that fraction had eroded to 37 percent.
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Key Trends at Sole Proprietorships Over the Past 30 Years
Features, September 22, 2014
While the number of sole proprietorships has exploded over the past three decades, their revenues and income have remained largely constant in inflation-adjusted terms. The end result has been a decline in real sales and income at the average sole proprietorship, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) statistics reveal.
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Are Chains the New Job Creators?
Features, September 15, 2014
A declining rate of firm formation over the past three-and-a-half decades has brought with it a fall in job creation by new firms. Between 1978 and 2011, the contribution of new firms to employment at business establishments has fallen from 3.4 percent in 1978 to 2.0 percent.
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U.S. Business Ownership Drops
Features, September 11, 2014
The share of American families that owns a business dropped significantly between 2010 and 2013, falling to its lowest level since the Federal Reserve first began measuring it in 1989. Between 2010 and 2013 the fraction of U.S. families with business equity declined from 13.3 to 11.7 percent, the Federal Reserve reports.
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How Has the Financial Condition of Private Companies Changed in Recent Years?
Features, August 11, 2014
As you might have expected, the financial condition of private companies have changed substantially over the past twelve years, as the country experienced the end of a housing boom; a financial crisis that nearly took down Wall Street; the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression; and five years of one of the country’s weakest economic recoveries. But you might be surprised to learn how those financials have shifted. The changes aren’t all as one might have predicted.
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The Role of Entrepreneurship in Rising Income Inequality
Features, June 20, 2014
Income inequality is growing in America, and it has much of the chattering class in an uproar.
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Secondary Self-Employment in Decline
Features, May 22, 2014
Fewer Americans are working for themselves than did at the turn of the 21st century. That’s true for both people’s primary and secondary jobs, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data indicate.
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Self Employment Continues to Decline, Despite the Recovery
Features, May 07, 2014
The recently released Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity (KIEA) shows that pace of entry into self-employment declined last year. The media has put a positive slant on the news. Because many people go into business for themselves out of necessity when the economy is doing poorly and they have few employment alternatives, this decline is okay, the reporters say. It means that the jobs market is doing better.
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Why the IRS and BLS Disagree on Self-Employment Trends
Features, April 02, 2014
Are more or fewer Americans engaged in self-employment than a decade ago? While you might think that this is a simple factual question, its answer depends on which federal government agency’s numbers you look at.
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Is America in the Midst of a High Tech Entrepreneurship Boom?
Features, March 28, 2014
If you read the business press, you probably think the answer is yes. The popular media is full of stories about start-ups like Facebook, Groupon, Instagram, Linkedin, Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp, Yelp, and Zinga. American entrepreneurs are starting high tech companies at a feverish pace, the media experts say.
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Don’t Bet on IRS Budget Cuts Lowering Small Business Audit Rates
Features, March 20, 2014
After several years of increases, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) small businesses audit rate declined in 2013, data released recently by the tax authority reveal.
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Fewer Students Plan to Become Business Owners
Features, March 17, 2014
College students are more concerned with making money now than they were before the start of the Great Recession, research by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at UCLA, reveals. Maybe that’s self-evident. But here’s a more surprising finding: The fraction of students intending to become business owners has also declined since 2007.
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How the Affordable Care Act Will Reduce Small Business Employment
Features, February 25, 2014
The Congressional Budget Office reported that the Affordable Care Act will mean that two million fewer people will be employed full-time in 2017 than would be working in the absence of the law.
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Fewer Small Businesses Paying Late in 2013
Features, February 03, 2014
Small businesses were prompter at paying their loans and bills in 2013 than in 2012, data from several sources reveals. Moody’s Analytics and Experian reported substantial declines in both 30 and 90 day small business credit delinquency rates during the past year, part of an improving trend since the summer of 2011 when those rates peaked.
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What Do Small Business Administration (SBA) Loans Look Like?
Features, January 29, 2014
Hidden among the large amount of data released regularly by the Federal Reserve is some valuable information about the terms of Small Business Administration (SBA) guaranteed loans.
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The Era of Declining Self-Employment
Features, January 13, 2014
The number of employed Americans rose from 144,144,000 in October 2013 to 144,775,000 in November 2013, an increase of 631,000, according to Federal government data. That’s good news. More people going back to work is something that everyone – left, right and center – agrees is good for the country.
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How Common are Small Business Administration (SBA) Loans?
Features, October 04, 2013
Small Business Administration (SBA) guaranteed loans get a lot of attention in Washington. President Obama, for instance, believes that “the SBA should be provided additional resources to assist small businesses in acquiring capital necessary to start, continue, or expand operations”, the Congressional Research Service reports.
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Small Business Employment in Recessions and Expansions
Features, October 02, 2013
Small business employment has grown more slowly than big business employment since the end of the Great Recession. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Conventional wisdom is that small business employment declines more in economic downturns, but rises more in economic expansions. Small companies, the argument goes, are more nimble, making their employment decisions more responsive to economic conditions.
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Are Americans Becoming Interested in Entrepreneurship Again?
Features, September 17, 2013
The recently released Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), a nationally representative survey of American adults, reveals that the fraction of Americans who intend to start a business rose to 12.5 percent in 2012 — a substantial increase from the 8.3 percent recorded in 2008.
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Sole Proprietorship Revenues in Long Term Decline
News, August 12, 2013
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Small Business Employment Share Shrinking for a Good Reason
News, August 02, 2013
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Small Business Owners: Healthier, But Less Likely to Be Insured
Features, July 17, 2013
A majority of small business owners (53 percent) believe that running a company improves their health, a recent Bank of America survey indicates. And those in business for themselves are in better shape than those who work for others, a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being survey reveals.
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How the IRS Scandal Might Benefit Small Business
Features, June 17, 2013
A few weeks ago, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted that some of its employees improperly subjected to disproportionate scrutiny to conservative groups seeking to set up non-profit status. While you might think that the scandal has little to do with small business, in the strange world of Washington — where everything influences everything else — the scandal has the potential to benefit small business owners in several ways.