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Abstract

Whereas the last issue of the journal concentrated more on entrepreneurial finance, this issue presents a few studies concentrating on business ventures in the United States, the emerging Polish economy and the developed economy of Italy. Small firms are a powerful economic force in the economies of the United States, Italy and Poland. According to the United States Small Business Administration (SBA), small firms are defined as those having 500 or fewer employees. Firms of this size represent 99 percent of all firms in the U.S. These business ventures generate the majority of net new jobs and are a major source of innovation in the form of newly developed products and services. In the lead article, Benjamin Franklin Professor of Economics and the 1980 Nobel Prize laureate for his contributions to economic theory and econometric modeling, Lawrence R. Klein, joins with Suleyman Ozmucur to study one of the most important issues which entrepreneurs and small business ventures were facing in 2002, i.e., the influence of terrorism within the United States. This most timely question is answered in an original way by observing consumer behavior and investor optimism in order to forecast the subjective feelings of participants in the economy. Klein and Ozmucur find that in order to tackle this issue, the use of survey data, long used in practice and too often ignored in economic estimation, are useful tools in measuring the responses of consumers, producers and managers to the September 11, 2001, surprise attack on U.S.’s soil. The inclusion of survey data, in addition to more traditional measures of performance of the U.S. economy, enables the inclusion of a complicated mixture of psychological and economic reactions that deserve careful investigation of its dynamic characteristics.

JEL Codes

Y20

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