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National Survey of Small Business Finances
SSBF index


1993 National Survey of Small Business Finances
The 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finances (NSSBF) is the second survey of U.S. small businesses conducted by the Board of Governors and the U.S. Small Business Administration. The survey collected information on firm and owner characteristics, an inventory of small businesses' use of financial services and of their financial service suppliers, and income and balance sheet information. This site contains working papers and methodology reports, a codebook and related documentation, the survey questionnaire, and the full 1993 public data set.


Methodology Reports and Papers
Methodology Report
The methodology report, by Price Waterhouse, LLP, describes the survey from inception to final data collection and the methodologies employed, including sampling, weighting, questionnaire design, pretesting, interviewing, and response. Note: When uncompressed, the WordPerfect version of the methodology report requires approximately 1.1 MB of disk space.
Report (349 KB WordPerfect 6.0 PKZIP compression) | (509 KB PDF)

Financial Services Used by Small Businesses: Evidence from the 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finances
Rebel A. Cole and John D. Wolken
Federal Reserve Bulletin, vol. 81 (July 1995), pp. 630-67.
Article (197 KB PDF)

Bank and Nonbank Competition for Small Business Credit: Evidence from the 1987 and 1993 National Surveys of Small Business Finances
Rebel A. Cole, John D. Wolken, and R. Louise Woodburn
Federal Reserve Bulletin, vol. 82 (November 1996), pp. 938-95.
Article (120 KB PDF)

Documentation
Two types of technical documentation for the 1993 NSSBF are available: the public use codebook and the questionnaire. A third piece of documentation, the frequency distributions, is also available.

Codebook for the 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finances
The codebook contains a summary of technical features of the survey design, a brief description of weight results, a description of how to use the account and institution inventory data, a list of definitions of the variables, and an index of the variables contained in the public data set. Frequency distributions of the variables contained in the public data set are available separately. Note: When uncompressed, the WordPerfect version of the codebook requires approximately 453 KB of disk space and the distributions requires approximately 400 KB of disk space.
Codebook (70 KB WordPerfect 6.0 PKZIP compression) | (225 KB PDF)
Distributions (54 KB WordPerfect PKZIP compression) | (219 KB PDF)

Survey Questionnaire
Here is the text of the questionnaire used for the interviews. The text includes the verbatim questions, prompts employed during the computer-assisted telephone interview, and all skip patterns. Note: When uncompressed, the WordPerfect version of the questionnaire will take up approximately 210 KB of disk space.
Questionnaire (42 KB WordPerfect 6.0 PKZIP compression) | (221 KB PDF)

Survey Data
The survey data available here are contained in either a SAS transport file or an ASCII flat (rectangular) file.

SAS Transport File
The SAS transport file is compressed in two ways: Unix compressed (.Z) and PKZIP (.ZIP). Note: When uncompressed, the SAS transport file requires approximately 32 MB of disk space. Examples of programs to convert from the SAS transport file to a SAS data set on the Unix and Windows platforms are provided in the file transport.
SAS data for PCs (2.5 MB .ZIP)
SAS data for Unix (2.5 MB .Z)

ASCII Flat File
The ASCII flat file is also compressed in two ways: Unix compressed (.Z) and PKZIP (.ZIP). Note: In order for the PC version of the ASCII file to fit onto diskettes when left zipped, the data had to be split into two files. Once unzipped, these files must be recombined for the full data set.

Further information regarding ASCII flat file (17 KB ASCII)
List of variables (9 KB ASCII)
ASCII data for PCs Part I (1.1 MB .ZIP) | Part II (568 KB .ZIP)
ASCII data for Unix (1.6 MB .Z)


Bootstrap, Sampling Error, and the 1993 NSSBF
When using survey data to compute estimates, accounting for sampling error is important. In the case of the NSSBF, the sample design is sufficiently complex that it is not possible to apply standard methods to estimate sampling variance without a number of assumptions. For this survey, we use a bootstrap replication procedure to capture the important dimensions of variation in the original sample selection and the adjustments made at the weighting stage. Taking the full sample as a base, we selected a set of 1,000 bootstrap samples. For each of these samples, we constructed weights that incorporate all of the adjustments made for the main analysis weight. The distribution of weighted estimates for each of the bootstrap replicates approximates the sampling distibution of the estimate made with the full sample and the main analysis weights. The data set of
bootstrap samples, along with an example of how to use this data set, are available for the 1993 NSSBF.


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Last update: November 1, 2006