Reading List

Free-to-read research and reports behind Weaver's work.

Most of the research on small business and entrepreneurial ecosystems sits behind journal paywalls. Everything here is free to read. It's a short list on purpose: start with any one of these and you'll see why we measure the way we do.

Who we're counting

U.S. Census Bureau, Number of U.S. Nonemployers Grew Faster Than Employer Businesses Nearly Every Year From 2012 to 2023 (2025). How many businesses have no employees, and how fast that group is growing.

Main Street America, A Closer Look at Legacy Businesses, Small-Scale Producers, and High Performers (2026). Current national survey data on the smallest businesses on Main Street.

Marion Polge, Colette Fourcade and Martine Spence, What If Not Growing Were the Best Strategy for a Company? (2026). The authors' plain-language account of a 12-year study of 13 microenterprises that chose to stay small and became more profitable and better places to work.

How ecosystems work

Ben Spigel, The Relational Organization of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (2017). One of the most widely used frameworks for entrepreneurial ecosystems. A useful baseline for seeing what changes when you design for microenterprise instead of high-growth startups.

SourceLink, KCSourceLink: The Original Model and the Resource Rail ebook. The practitioner model for mapping a region's business resources by stage and need.

Center on Rural Innovation and Capital One, Roots of Prosperity (2026). What helps entrepreneurship take root in rural America, and how much of it national data can't see. Read our take in Field Notes.

What helps founders, pool by pool

Social capital. Raina Brands and colleagues, When Form Leads to Function: Network Closure and Social Identity Threat Among Women Entrepreneurs (2025). Close-knit networks help women founders by building trust, while open networks are where new information and opportunities tend to come from.

Physical and digital infrastructure. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, Shared Kitchens and Food Startups (2022). How shared kitchens support food startups and the regional economies around them.

Knowledge transfer. J-PAL, Teaching Business Skills to Support Microentrepreneurs. What randomized evaluations show about business training and mentoring, including how often the gains fade.

Financial accessibility. Joyce Klein, Addressing the Capitalization and Financial Constraints of CDFI Microlenders (2021). Why the lenders best positioned to serve microbusinesses are themselves short on capital.

Measuring what matters

Herman Aguinis and colleagues, Public Policy Implications of Entrepreneurship Research (2026). Of more than 4,000 entrepreneurship studies reviewed, just 1.4% included an explicit section on policy implications.

FIELD at the Aspen Institute and IRIS, Microenterprise Metrics. The core indicators microenterprise programs already use, and a starting point for asking what's missing.

From Weaver

The Wrong Metrics by Jessica Affatato. Our research on how traditional economic development measures miss the 78% of U.S. businesses with no employees.

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