A significant amount of research has demonstrated the importance of entrepreneurship for economic and community development in rural areas. Less established is what type of local support organizations can foster the birth and growth of these small businesses. Another unanswered question is whether the relationship between business outcomes and support organizations is similar between rural and urban locations.

We test the general hypothesis that more local support organizations leads to higher business births and maturation (i.e. growing to a "Stage 2" business of 10+ employees) using panel data for all U.S. counties from 2015-2023. The dependent variables are aggregate 2-digit NAICS births for each county-year, and the independent variables of interest are 5 distinct 4-digit NAICS categories including religious organizations, grantmaking / giving services, social advocacy organizations, civic and social organizations, and business / professional organizations. The data comes from the Business Dynamics Research Consortium at Wisconsin and is compiled from Data Axle (which follows millions of U.S. businesses over time).

Fixed effect panel Poisson models estimate the impact of the 5 distinct support organizations on births and maturation. These models include county and year fixed effects and control for the number of businesses started (in the same sector and overall) in the prior year as well as education, income, unemployment, and broadband adoption rates. The results show that some support organizations (grantmaking services, civic organizations) have positive impacts while others (religious, social advocacy) are typically negative. There are meaningful differences in results across metro, non-metro and "very rural" counties.