The Annual Business Survey (ABS) is the primary source of information on research and development (R&D) expenditures for nonfarm, for-profit, businesses operating in the United States with one to nine employees. The ABS also collects data on innovation-related data, globalization, and business owner characteristics from nonfarm, for-profit, businesses operating in the United States with at least one employee.
Modules were added on Goods, Services, and Business Processes and Technology; Design and Intellectual Property; and Domestic and Foreign Transactions (Globalization). Five new questions were added, and one question was removed in the Coronavirus Pandemic Impact on R&D and Business Activities module. Questions on capital expenditures were added to the R&D module. A question was added on owner disability in the owner demographics module.
Annual.
Calendar year 2017; for innovation, the reference period was 2015–17.
Calendar year 2021; for innovation, the reference period was 2019–21.
Nonfarm businesses in the United States.
Sample survey of for-profit companies with a U.S. presence engaged in the mining, utilities, construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade, retail trade, or services industries.
Approximately 4,900,000 employer businesses.
Approximately 300,000 employer businesses.
Key variables of interest are listed below.
The target population consists of all for-profit nonfarm companies that are physically located in the United States, that have at least one establishment classified as being an in-scope sector based on the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), and that was in business during the survey reference year and data collection period.
The Business Register, maintained by the Census Bureau, is the source used to create the sampling frame for the ABS.
The ABS has a systematic stratified sampling design that uses simple random sampling within strata. Stratification is based on the NAICS industry code. Companies were selected with certainty if they are known R&D performers with one to nine employees, 500 or more employees, or meet sampling stratum-specific cutoffs for receipts and payroll.
The ABS collects data electronically.
All data submitted by respondent companies are reviewed to ensure that data fields are complete and that data are internally consistent. Survey responses often include errors that require correction or unusual patterns that require validation. Automated edit checks are applied to improve the efficiency of data review and correction. Edit checks are designed to catch arithmetic errors and logically inconsistent responses (balance edits). The remaining automated edit checks are designed to flag outliers for further review (analytical edits). If additional information or data corrections are needed, respondents may be contacted to clarify or correct data. If additional information or corrected data cannot be obtained from respondents, data are imputed.
Estimates are produced from sums of weighted data (reported or imputed). Exceptions are described in detail in the tables containing relative standard errors and imputed rates (available upon request from the Survey Manager).
Estimates of sampling errors associated with the ABS data tables are available from the Survey Manager upon request.
There can be both undercoverage error, where units are not included in the frame, and overcoverage error, where units included in the frame are actually out of scope for the population of interest. The ABS uses the prior-year Business Register to construct the frame, so any changes in businesses that would change the inclusion or exclusion of the business to the survey scope could be sources of coverage error. Prior to tabulation, survey units’ information is updated with the most recently available Business Register data to mitigate this source of error.
Unit nonresponse will be done by adjusting weighted reported and imputed data by multiplying each company's sampling weight by a nonresponse adjustment factor. Detailed descriptions of the adjustments for nonresponse will be available in the ABS data tables (https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/annual-business-survey/).
Expected sources of measurement error include differences in respondent interpretations of the definitions of R&D activities and differences in how companies count and report numbers of employees in various categories, including whether they work on R&D full time or part time. Error can also occur when respondents do not report dollar amounts correctly. Although quantitative metrics of measurement error are not available, there are ongoing efforts to minimize measurement error, including questionnaire pretesting, improvement of questionnaire wording and format, inclusion of more cues and examples in the questionnaire instructions, in-person and telephone interviews and consultations with respondents, and post-survey evaluations.
Data produced from the ABS will be available at https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/annual-business-survey/.
The ABS is a cross-sectional survey designed to produce annual estimates of R&D performance and related statistics. Some estimates from the ABS may not be directly comparable to prior ABS results due to changes in survey methodology. Sources of possible incomparability include changes to questionnaire wording and instructions, changes to data editing and tabulation, and changes to imputation and nonresponse adjustments.
ABS data will be published in NCSES InfoBriefs and data table reports in the Business and Industry R&D series (https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/industry/).
Results from this survey are available on the NCSES website at https://ncses.nsf.gov/. The ABS contains confidential data that are protected under Title 13 and Title 26 of the U.S. Code. Restricted microdata will be available at any of the 15 secure Research Data Centers administered by the Center for Economic Studies (CES) at the Census Bureau. Researchers interested in accessing microdata can apply for a restricted-use license by submitting a proposal to the CES, which evaluates proposals based on their benefit to the Census Bureau, scientific merit, feasibility, and risk of disclosure. To learn more about the Research Data Centers and how to apply, please visit the CES page on research opportunities https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ces.html. For additional information about the application process, including how to initiate a project, please contact the administrator at the primary site where the research will be conducted. Per the Federal Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2015, the data are protected from cybersecurity risks through screening of the systems that transmit the data.