This paper investigates whether new venture performance becomes easier to predict as the venture ages: does the fog lift? To address this question we primarily draw upon a theoretical framework, initially formulated in a managerial context by Levinthal (1991) that sees new venture sales as a...

Does our ability to predict the performance of new ventures improve in the years after start-up? We investigate the growth and survival of 6247 new ventures that are tracked using the customer records at Barclays Bank. We put forward Gambler's Ruin as a simple theory for understanding new...

While several plots of the aggregate age distribution suggest that firm age is exponentially distributed, we find some departures from the exponential benchmark. At the lower tail, we find that very young establishments are more numerous than expected, but they face high exit hazards. At the...