Advancing Research for Jobs and Opportunity in Small Business

 

Advancing Research for Jobs and Opportunity in Small Business 

At a time when small businesses face growing pressures—and workers seek better jobs closer to home—AEO is strengthening the infrastructure needed to produce research that bridges policy, practice, and lived experiences. 

We’re excited to announce two key milestones in our two-year research initiative focused on job quality in small business and supported by WorkRise, a research-to-action network hosted by the Urban Institute: 

1) The formation of a project Advisory Council to guide our research and deepen its practical relevance, and

2) The release of new, nationally representative data on small business employer practices through the 2025 Entrepreneurship in the Population (EPOP) survey.

Together, these milestones reflect AEO’s commitment to building a more responsive, equitable small business ecosystem that is backed by data and driven by community insight. As AEO President & CEO Natalie Madeira Cofield notes:

“At AEO, we know that small business employers are vital to both economic growth and community well-being. This new data provides an important window into their experiences and challenges, helping us and our partners better understand the landscape for entrepreneurs and workers. By working closely with leaders across the country, we are building the evidence base needed to strengthen business outcomes and expand opportunity for small business owners and their employees.”

Practitioner-Informed Advisory Council 

We’ve convened a project-specific Advisory Council composed of leading researchers, practitioners, and ecosystem stakeholders who all bring deep expertise and frontline experience to the table. 

Rather than centering only academic perspectives, this Council ensures our work reflects the real constraints and innovations that define small business support in the field. Their guidance is shaping everything from question design to data interpretation to strategy for scaling insights into action. 

“Our goal is to generate research that’s not just rigorous, but also relevant, and rooted in what small employers and their communities actually need,” said Dr. Lori Smith, Senior Research Advisor at AEO. “This Council helps us stay grounded in that mission.” 

A full list of members is available on the project page here. 

New National Data on Small Business Employers 

In parallel, AEO contributed a new module on small business employer practices to the 2025 Entrepreneurship in the Population (EPOP) survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. This marks the first time the EPOP survey has included targeted questions designed to capture how small employers specifically navigate decisions around job quality. 

With support from WorkRise and input from our Advisory Council, we developed the module to spotlight the experiences of very small employers—particularly those with fewer than 10 employees—a segment often overlooked in national labor market data, despite being foundational to local economies.  

Topics include:

  • Financial security, benefits, and scheduling flexibility
  • Hiring and retention strategies
  • Challenges in recruiting and managing staff
  • Barriers to digital adoption that affect job quality (e.g., lack of payroll, scheduling, or HR software)
  • Owner values and motivations for improving job quality
  • Job quality considerations for both employees and business owners

When analyzed alongside the broader EPOP:2025 data, this new module opens the door to deeper insights into how to advance job quality and opportunity in small business. 

We’ve made the full module public and encourage use by researchers, policymakers, and advocates who seek to better understand how small businesses make employment decisions that affect worker well-being. 

Download the EPOP data here. 

 

In tandem with this employer-focused effort, AEO is also fielding a national survey of employees working in businesses with fewer than 10 employees—a group that represents a major share of low-wage work in the U.S. but is often left out of federal datasets and labor policy debates. By centering their experiences, we aim to shed light on how job quality is understood and experienced on the ground in the smallest workplaces—informing new strategies for creating jobs and opportunity in small business. 

We’ll be sharing early findings from both surveys in a series of research briefs this year and releasing a full-length report in 2026.