We survey the phenomenon of the growth of firms drawing on literature from economics, management, and sociology. We begin with a review of empirical 'stylised facts' before discussing theoretical contributions. Firm growth is characterized by a predominant stochastic element, making it difficult...

Serial correlation in annual growth rates carries a lot of information on growth processes it allows us to directly observe firm performance as well as to test theories. Using a 7-year balanced panel of 10 000 French manufacturing firms, we observe that small firms typically are subject to...

This paper investigates whether financial obstacles, and, more generally, financial pressure faced by firms, significantly affect firm growth. For this purpose, we use an unbalanced panel of about 1,000,000 observations for around 155,000 non-financial corporations in five euro area countries....

Using a large panel of Hungarian firms, we study the relation between firm size and net job creation. Categorizing firms in size groups with the traditionally used measure of employment size in the base year suggests that small firms create a disproportionally higher number of jobs than large...

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

It is often claimed that small and young firms account for a disproportionately large share of net employment growth. We conduct a meta analysis of the empirical evidence regarding whether net employment growth rather is generated by a few rapidly growing firms - so-called Gazelles - that are...

This essay argues that the economic contribution of certain firms - be they small, young or rapidly growing - has to be understood in a broader context of creative destruction. Growth of some firms requires contraction and exit of some other firms to free up resources that can be reallocated to...

This paper offers new insights into the processes of firm growth by applying a reducedform vector autoregression (VAR) model to longitudinal panel data on French manufacturing firms. We observe the co-evolution of key variables such as growth of employment, sales, and gross operating surplus, as...

While Gibrat's Law assumes that growth rate variance is independent of size, empirical work has usually found a negative relationship between growth rate variance and firm growth. Using data on French manufacturing firms, we observe a relatively low, but statistically significant, negative...

This paper analyses the association between dynamic capabilities and new firm growth, controlling for measures of firm resources, characteristics of the entrepreneur, and aspects of the environment. The central research question is: How strong is the relationship between dynamic capabilities and...