Drs. Murray Rice and Chetan Tiwari recently received a grant from the Kauffman Foundation's Metropolitan Entrepreneurship Research Program to study business development in cities across the United States. As lead investigators of a collaborative international research team, their research will focus on the Inc 500 list of companies, an annually-published ranking of the most rapidly-growing private businesses in the United States.

Their investigation will address the question of whether the emergence of such dynamic businesses leads to long-term job and wealth creation, and the extent to which geography plays a role in facilitating such firm-based economic development. Drs. Rice and Tiwari will work with their team and a UNT Geography master's student, Vicki Oppenheim, through summer 2015. During that time, they will collect and analyze business data for every business appearing in the Inc 500 ranking for 2000-2010.

Kauffman Foundation funding will support the research project, presentation of preliminary results at a special entrepreneurship conference hosted by Kauffman in Kansas City in fall 2015, and presentation of final results at the upcoming San Francisco AAG in spring 2016.