New Companies = New Jobs

But research published last month by three economists, working with more recent and detailed data sets than before, has found that once the age of the businesses is taken into account, there is no difference in the job-producing performance of small companies and big ones.

“Size plays virtually no role,” says John C. Haltiwanger, a co-author of the study and an economist at the University of Maryland. “It’s all age — start-ups are where the job-creation action really occurs.”

Start-ups account for much job destruction as well. Within five years, half of these businesses have folded. Yet the survivors are prime candidates to join the young, dynamic companies that make an outsize contribution to innovation, productivity gains and job growth, Mr. Haltiwanger says.

So any serious discussion of job creation, it seems, should look at the business tactics and policy steps that are most likely to nurture more of these promising corporate upstarts.

Doing that can be tricky, however, and government small-business initiatives are often misguided, according to Josh Lerner, a professor at the Harvard Business School. Government programs to stimulate bank lending, he says, are not geared to entrepreneurial start-ups. Those new companies need equity investment to fund risk-taking, free of the financial burden of paying interest on loans.

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For Mr. Silbert, work-force issues trump taxes as a long-term concern. Like many other entrepreneurs, he advocates granting more residence visas to skilled immigrants, especially those who attend American universities.

“The best and the brightest from other countries come here, and then we’re not letting them stay,” he said. “That will damage innovation and job creation in the United States.”

FOREIGN-BORN entrepreneurs have long played a big role in American start-ups. A study that tracked technology and engineering start-ups from 1995 to 2005 found that one quarter of them had a foreign-born chief executive or head technologist; by 2005, the surviving companies generated $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers.

There are signs that policy makers are looking to accommodate highly skilled workers and entrepreneurs, says Robert Litan, an economist at the Kauffman Foundation. As one example, he points to legislation proposed this year by Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana. Called the Start-Up Visa Act, it would grant visas to immigrant entrepreneurs who create jobs in the United States.

“In this economic environment, I think job-creating ideas that don’t cost money are going to get a fair hearing,” Mr. Litan says.