Research

The Dakri Center’s research agenda focuses on businesses that are Main Street businesses－ organizations with few employees often with a sole owner or a “Mom-and-Pop" family ownership model. Despite having few employees per business, these businesses make up the vast majority of small businesses in the country. Over 99 percent of America’s 28.7 million firms are small businesses.¹

Through the work of the SURE Program, the Dakri Center is well positioned to perform in-depth, longitudinal studies on Main Street entrepreneurship. The SURE team has already begun collecting data in support of its research agenda. In addition to data that is useful for the administration of the SURE program the team collects information about entrepreneurs that is also useful in research (for example, benchmark financial literacy measures and individual risk preferences of the entrepreneurs). CEI is in a unique position to perform three different types of research related to Main Street Entrepreneurship:

• Archival research about Main Street entrepreneurship in aggregate in the US: Using publicly available sources including information from company registration data and publicly available information about government-backed lending distributed by the Small Business Administration in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act in conjunction with new methods of data imputation, the CEI research team is able to look at the distribution of lending in the US. This research is already in progress with co-authors from the University of California at San Diego.
• In-depth, small sample archival research using data that only CEI has access to by studying the current and alumni entrepreneurs of the SURE Program. This data set allows for studying dimensions of entrepreneurship that cannot be studied with publicly available data. For example, dimensions of the entrepreneur’s personality, such as their risk tolerance level, and longitudinal data that is not available in public sources, for example revenue growth in small businesses. In the US even basic information such as revenues, expenditures, profits and number of employees of small businesses are not collected and publicized. The government performs surveys and presents data in aggregate, but there are no publicly available longitudinal data sets on small businesses which has hampered research in this field.
• In addition, CEI is in a unique position to perform field experiments in entrepreneurship. The use of randomized controlled trials is the gold standard for research in the hard sciences, however adoption in the social sciences is lagging. This has been shifting and in 2019 Esther Duflo along with her two co-researchers was awarded the Nobel Prize for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.² Economists of various stripes – development, education, etc. – have begun to adopt the use of randomized controlled trials to determine the effects of interventions. Through the SURE Program, the CEI could test what approaches to education affect long-term outcomes of the business or what types of interventions might increase the likelihood that entrepreneurs are successfully able to obtain third party funding for their business.

The existence of three different prongs of research creates opportunities not just for the CEI Team, but also for PhD students and for more cross-disciplinary research with faculty from other departments. As stated earlier, the research studies currently in progress is co-authored work with faculty from the Business school and the Economics department at the University of California – San Diego. In 2024 the Dakri Center partnered with the College of Education and the Hobby School of Public Affairs to evaluate the environment for childcare providers in the Gulf Coast region of Texas and provide them with resources for enhancing their curriculum and their business knowledge. As the CEI develops and has increased visibility on campus, we would like to develop similar relationships with faculty in other departments at the University of Houston.