This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of differentbusiness strategies is conditional on the firm’s distance to the industry frontier. We usedata on four 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the US over the period 1972-1999, and apply...

We attempt to describe the coevolution of employment growth, sales growth andgrowth of profits in a panel of French manufacturing firms 1996-2004. Our analysisentails ‘recursive’ panel vector autoregressions, whereby we impose the structure of employmentgrowth leading to contemporaneous...

We apply a panel vector autoregression model to a firm-level longitudinal databaseto observe the co-evolution of sales growth, employment growth, profits growth andgrowth of R&D expenditure. Contrary to expectations, profit growth seems to havelittle detectable effect on R&D investment. Instead,...

The issue of technological unemployment receives perennial popular attention. Althoughthere are previous empirical investigations that have focused on the relationship between innovationand employment, the originality of our approach lies in our choice of method. We focus onfour 2-digit...

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 predominantstochastic element, making it...

Empirical work on micro and small firms has focused on developed countries.The little work that exists on developing countries is all too often based on smallsamples taken from ad hoc questionnaires. The census data we analyze are fairlyrepresentative of the structure of small business in India....

We analyse how the COVID-19 crisis impacted firms' employment levels and digitalisation efforts differently depending on their pre-crisis productivity, digitalisation and growth performance. We match the EIB Investment Survey with firm-level financial statements from the ORBIS database for 27 EU...

Export boosting is a policy agenda in developed and developing countries. Previous work has found that a small number of Superstars contribute disproportionally to the economy's overall exports. Differently from Superstars, this study is the first to define high growth exporters (HGXs), provide...

Policy-makers and scholars often assume that a higher incidence of high-growth firms (HGFs) is synonymous with vibrant regional economic dynamics, and that HGF shares are persistent over time as Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EEs) have slowly-changing features. In this paper we test these...

This paper contributes to a fast-growing literature on the impact of COVID-19 on the business economy, by focusing on how a particular group of firms - High-Growth Enterprises (HGEs) have been affected by COVID-19 across several dimensions, such as investment expectations, investment priorities,...