Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs

The ASE universe was stratified by frame, geographic area, and the number of years the firm was in business. The geographic area stratification variable included a combination of state and the 50 most populous metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) as of 2014. The MSAs are listed below. If a business operated in multiple states or large MSAs, its geographical area was set to a multi-state category. If it operated in only one large MSA, its geographical area was set to that large MSA. Otherwise, the sole state that the business operated in was used as its geographical area. Only companies that had paid employees were sampled. The Census Bureau selected large companies with certainty.'These companies were selected based on volume of sales, payroll, or number of paid employees. All certainty cases were sure to be selected and represented only themselves (i.e., had a selection probability of one and a sampling weight of one). The certainty cutoffs varied by sampling stratum, and each stratum was sampled at varying rates, depending on the number of firms in a particular industry in a particular state. The remaining universe was subjected to stratified systematic random sampling.

The ASE collects statistics on the characteristics of businesses and their owners. Additionally, estimates are produced for employer businesses on the number of firms, sales and receipts, annual payroll, and employment. Data are presented by gender, ethnicity, race, and veteran status for the United States by 2-digit 2012 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), states, the top 50 metropolitan statistical areas, employment size, receipts size, and number of years in business.

Content for the ASE includes questions from the 2012 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) (form SBO-1). The Census Bureau’s collaboration with the survey sponsors, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), resulted in the expanded collection of the businesses’ sources of capital and access to financing, and a new module of questions for each survey year based on relevant economic topics. The module selected for the 2016 ASE focused on business banking relationships, practices in obtaining and using advice from professional and nonprofessional sources, and the effect of regulations on business growth. The ASE is conducted on an annual basis for three reference years starting with reference year 2014. For more about the content of ASE compared to other business surveys, see https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ase/guidance.html

ALPHA (Census firm ID). Business Register ENTERPRISE_ID (Census firm identifier for multi-units). FIRMID (Census firm identifier)

• Employer Identification Number (EIN)
• County FIPS code
• State FIPS code
• State abbreviation
• Zip code
• Other (see Linkage Capabilities description)