High-growth firms (HGFs) have attracted considerable attention recently, as academics and policymakers have increasingly recognized the highly skewed nature of many metrics of firm performance. A small number of HGFs drives a disproportionately large amount of job creation, while the average...

B<sc>uerger</sc> M., B<sc>roekel</sc> T. and C<sc>oad</sc> A. Regional dynamics of innovation: investigating the co-evolution of patents, research and development (R&D), and employment, <italic>Regional Studies</italic>. This paper investigates the lead--lag relationships between the growth rates of patents, research and development...

F<sc>rankish</sc> J. S., R<sc>oberts</sc> R. G., C<sc>oad</sc> A. and S<sc>torey</sc> D. J. Is entrepreneurship a route out of deprivation?, <italic>Regional Studies</italic>. This paper investigates whether entrepreneurship constitutes a route out of deprivation for those living in deprived areas. The measure of income/wealth used is based on an...

Little is known about how firm performance changes with age, presumably because of the paucity of data on firm age. We analyze the performance of a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms between 1998 and 2006, relating it to firm age. We find evidence that firms improve with age, because ageing...

This paper links new firm survival with growth, with a focus on the patterns in firms' growth paths. We theorise a Gambler's Ruin framework by arguing that new firm performance is best modelled as a random walk process, but that survival is nonrandom and depends primarily on the stock of...

We study employment and new hires among high-growth firms (HGFs) in the Swedish knowledge-intensive sectors 1999--2002. Using matched employer--employee data, we find that HGFs are more likely to employ young people, poorly educated workers, immigrants, and individuals who experienced longer...

Despite an almost universally accepted belief outside academia that entrepreneurial activity is a positive driving force in the economy, the accumulated evidence remains largely inconclusive. This article positions the increased interest in entrepreneurship since the 1980s within its historical...

This paper offers many new insights into the processes of firm growth by applying a 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, gross operating surplus and labour...

Complicated neoclassical models predict that if investment is sensitive to current financial performance, this is a sign that something is "wrong" and is to be regarded as a problem for policy. Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, refers to the principle of "growth of the fitter" to explain...

A robust feature of the corporate growth process is the exponential distribution of firm growth rates. This striking empirical regularity has been found to hold for a number of different datasets and at different levels of aggregation. In this paper, we propose a simple theoretical model capable...