This paper analyses the effect of financial, knowledge, demand, market structure and regulation barriers to innovation on firms’ economic performance. It contributes to the literature on barriers to innovation in a two-fold way. First, it disentangles the mediated effect of obstacles, via...

Investigating the role of diversification in the firm growth process, we build on Penrose’s (The theory of the growth of the firm. Oxford University Press, Oxford, <CitationRef CitationID="CR30">1959</CitationRef>) Theory of the Growth of the Firm to formulate hypotheses about growth of employment, assets and sales in the years before,...</citationref>

In recent years, there has been an increase in empirical and theoretical work that addresses the role of innovation as one of the main sources of firm growth. The purpose of this special issue is to strengthen the role played by innovation as a determinant of firm growth. Despite the emergence...

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...

High Growth Firms (HGFs) make a considerable contribution to economic growth, and in recent years they have received increasing interest from entrepreneurship scholars. By analysing recent findings in the literature of high growth firms, this study identifies some stylized facts, as well as...

A robust feature of the corporate growth process is the Laplace, or symmetric exponential, distribution of firm growth rates. In this paper, we sketch out a class of simple theoretical models capable of explaining this empirical regularity. We do not attempt to generalize on where growth...

We focus on the relationship between age and diversification patterns of German machine tool manufacturers in the post-war era. We distinguish between ‘minor diversification’ (adding a new product variation within a familiar submarket) and ‘major diversification’ (expanding the product...

This paper explores the determinants of start-up size by focusing on a cohort of 6,247 businesses that started trading in 2004, using a unique dataset on customer records at Barclays Bank. Quantile regressions show that prior business experience is significantly related with start-up size, as...

We develop a series of hypotheses that predict that the appropriateness of different business strategies is conditional on the firm's relative performance, or distance to the "industry frontier." We use data on three 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the United States over the period...