This ‘Debate Essay’ responds to the extensive overview of research on new venture survival provided by Soto-Simeone et al. (2020). The material they reviewed exclusively emphasised the link between the talents, skills, awareness of the business owner and new venture outcomes. Our case is...

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...

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...

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...

In this short research note we investigate the role of diversification in the firm growth process. We build on Penrose's (1959) Theory of the Growth of the Firm to formulate hypotheses about growth of employment, assets, and sales in the years before, during and after a new product introduction....

Research has recently emphasized that the non-survival of entrepreneurs can be disaggregated into distinct exit routes such as merger and acquisition (M&A), voluntary closure and failure. Firm performance is an alleged determinant of exit route. However, there is a lack of evidence linking exit...

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...

The COVID-19 shock hit firms hard, on average, but how did it hit in the distribution of firms, differently between the high-growth superstars and the firms that were already struggling to survive? This paper implements graphical techniques and quantile regression to analyse the effect of the...