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Journal Article
Small Business Performance in Industries in LMI Neighborhoods After the Great Recession: Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles
Small businesses are essential to the economic infrastructure of both lower-income and higher-income neighborhoods. In this report, we compare small business performance in lower-income vs higher-income areas. Findings offer some directions for growing small businesses in LMI and ethnic/minority neighborhoods
Journal Article
Financial access and insurance: a preliminary description of factors that affect immigrants
Providing financial services to immigrants is a growing business for bankers, and a growing area of study for policymakers and researchers. While still an emerging field, most of the attention to financial access thus far has tended to focus on core banking products such as bank account ownership, mortgage loans, and services that immigrants tend to use more often than native-born, such as wire transfers, that banks must market more aggressively than in the past to attract (some) immigrant groups. Insurance is another financial tool that, like accounts and mortgages, helps households ...
Newsletter
Residential mobility and neighborhood characteristics in Chicago
Chicago neighborhoods vary widely in economic opportunity and well-being, and trends in population change reflect these disparities. According to census data, the city added about 50,000 residents between 2010 and 2020, but patterns differed considerably by neighborhood type. Some census tracts bore the largest burden of population loss, continuing a multi-decade period of decline, while several others saw rapid growth exceeding 10% per year.
Journal Article
Resource Utilization among Black Small Business Owners in Detroit: Results from a Questionnaire
One of the most important ways for small businesses to access capital is through connections to resource networks. Business networks are the set of arrangements and information platforms that business owners use to increase exposure and sales, gain knowledge of their markets, develop financial management skills, and familiarize themselves with sources of financing. Networks can also connect people to other service providers, such as nonprofit organizations and professionals that support business owners through technical and financial training, referrals, legal services and procurement ...
Journal Article
An Analysis of SBA Loans in Lower-income and Black neighborhoods in Detroit and Michigan
In this article, we analyze the extent to which the Small Business Administration (SBA) 7(a) loan guarantee program helps facilitate flows of credit to small businesses in the city of Detroit, and to black and low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in Michigan. In an environment of financial austerity and constrained small business credit, federal government programs like those administered by the SBA can facilitate lending to businesses. The SBA administers several programs designed to encourage lenders to provide loans to small businesses that might not otherwise obtain financing on ...
Journal Article
Small business access to capital: alternative resources bridging the gap
Nationwide in the U.S. over the past 15 years, small businesses generated 64 percent of the net new job growth. Small businesses with fewer than 500 employees, a definition used by the Small Business Administration (SBA), represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms, and employ more than half of private sector employees in the United States. Firms with fewer than 50 employees represent 95 percent of all employer firms. Since the recession that began in late 2007, large bank lending to small businesses has fallen by more than 50 percent.
Newsletter
Insurance and wealth building among lower-income households
In the summer of 2007, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago convened four focus groups to explore the connections between insurance, the process of wealth building and preservation, and financial access for low- and moderate-income consumers. This article examines the findings from those focus groups.
Journal Article
Developing small businesses and leveraging resources in Detroit: an informed discussion among financial institutions, policymakers and Other stakeholders in Detroit
In October 2012, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Michigan Bankers Association and the New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan co-sponsored a symposium in Detroit that brought together business experts, business owners, policymakers, funders and bankers to explore issues around access to small business credit and financing in Detroit. As Alicia Williams, vice president of the Community Development and Policy Studies (CDPS) division, explained in her opening remarks, the symposium was a follow-up to meetings hosted around the country by the Federal Reserve System?s Community ...