useful stats

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has made multiple announcements about the State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) in recent weeks, including new program approvals, providing an update on uses of funds through the first two years of the program, and highlighting venture capital success stories, and releasing a database of participating lenders. In addition to covering these updates below, SSTI is collecting Treasury’s resources in revised SSBCI tracking pages.

Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, the median net worth of Americans jumped an inflation-adjusted 37%, from approximately $141,000 to $192,000, representing the largest increase reported across available data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Breaking net worth down into its two main components, assets and debts, shows that while debts have increased, the sharp rise in assets—both financial and nonfinancial—has driven these numbers.

Led by increases in retail trade and professional, scientific, and technical services, the number of annual business applications nationwide has increased 119%, or nearly three million, from 2005 to 2023. However, the share of applications classified as high-propensity, or those more likely to result in businesses with a payroll, has decreased in all but the health care and social assistance sector, leading to a 26-percent point drop (58% to 32%) over the same period.

Business applications have greatly increased over the last two decades, jumping 119% from 2005 to 2023. However, the rate of high-propensity business applications—applications identified by the Census Bureau as having higher likelihoods of turning into businesses with payroll—have decreased as a share of all applications every year since 2005, despite having grown 22% over the same period.

While the growth of female-founded and co-founded companies has increased at a faster rate than those of male-founded and co-founded and mixed gender founded companies, it is still a smaller amount than the other two. Additionally, these companies are more likely to receive a higher proportion of deals occurring earlier in the VC pipeline.

The measurements for success of female-founded and female-co-founded companies, while improving, remain lower than male-founded companies in number, deal count, and capital invested, according to PitchBook’s 2023 Annual US VC Valuations Report. PitchBook found that female-only-founded startups received just 2% of all venture capital (VC) dollars in 2023, while those female-co-founded reached 21% that year—a record high.

Shrinking shares of job-creating, high-growth firms across the country, the topic of SSTI’s Useful Stats column in last week’s Digest, is not being experienced within all sectors of the economy, according to analysis of the Business Dynamics Statistics of High Growth Firms (BDS-HG) experimental dataset from the Census Bureau.

High-growth firms are often conflated with all other firms. Unfortunately, this tendency makes it extremely difficult to differentiate those with a higher likelihood of significantly impacting the economy and innovation.

This article, including the downloadable data sheet, visuals, and analysis, was updated on July 10th, 2024, to include new data from Treasury’s SSBCI Capital Program Summaries.

This article was edited on April 4th, 2024, to correct for an error in, and add to, the original data. Refer to the note at the bottom of this article for more detail.

Information on the geographic distribution of innovation and entrepreneurship is not easy to tease out of many federal statistical data sets, leading regional policy often to be based on trends in all business starts or life span and size—ignoring the fact that some firms have greater impact on regional economic growth than others. The U.S. Census Bureau is well aware of the challenge and, earlier this week, released an experimental data set that allows for an examination of state-level long-term trends in the change in high-growth firms and establishments across the nation.