The State of Minority- and Women- Owned ... - Cleveland.com

NAICS
Industry
Group
M/WBE Availability in the City of Cleveland’s Market Area
NAICS Description
Number of
Listed
M/WBEs
Industry
Weight
Industry
Weight
(Cumulative)
4471 Gasoline Stations 22 0.03 99.19
Source and Notes: See Table 4.1.
3. Verify Listed M/WBEs
a. Introduction
It is likely that information on M/WBEs from Dun & Bradstreet and other M/WBE directories is
not correct in all instances. Phenomena such as ownership changes, associate or mentor status,
recording errors, or even outright misrepresentation, will lead to businesses being listed as
M/WBEs in a particular directory even though they may actually be owned by nonminority
males. Other things equal, this type of error would cause our availability estimate to be biased
upward from the actual availability number.
The second likelihood that must be addressed is that not all M/WBE businesses are necessarily
listed—either in Dun & Bradstreet or in any of the other directories we collected. Such
phenomena as geographic relocation, ownership changes, directory compilation errors, fear of
stigmatization, and limitations in M/WBE outreach, could all lead to M/WBEs being unlisted.
Other things equal, this type of error would cause our availability estimate to be biased
downward from the actual availability number.
In our experience, we have found that both types of bias are not uncommon. For this Study, we
corrected for the effect of these biases using statistical sampling procedures. We surveyed a
large, stratified random sample of 6283 establishments drawn from the Baseline Business
Universe and measured how often they were misclassified (or unclassified) by race and/or
gender. 218
Strata were defined according to NAICS sectors and listed M/WBE status. 219 In the telephone
survey, up to 10 attempts were made to reach each business and speak with an appropriate
respondent. Attempts were scheduled for a mix of day and evening, weekdays and weekends,
and appointments were scheduled for callbacks when necessary. Of the 6,587 firms in our
sample, 3,202 (48.6%) were listed M/WBEs and 3,385 (51.4%) were unclassified by race or
gender. Of these 6,587 firms, however, 745 (11.3%) were excluded as “unable to contact.”
218 A similar method was employed by the Federal Reserve Board to deal with similar problems in designing and
implementing the National Survey of Small Business Finances for 1993 and 1998. See Haggerty, C.,
K. Grigorian, R. Harter and J. D. Wolken (2000).
219 Eighteen separate industry strata were created based on NAICS code. All 18 strata were then split according to
listed M/WBE status to create a total of 36 strata. Generally, listed M/WBEs were sampled at a higher rate than
unclassified establishments.
NERA Economic Consulting 121