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 rm performance is best modelled as a random walk process, but that survival is nonrandom and depends primarily on the stock of...

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...

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. The paper positions the increased interest in entrepreneurship since the 1980s within its historical...

It is well-known in the literature that self-employment positively influences job satisfaction, but the ejects on other life domains and overall life satisfaction are much less clear. Our study analyzes the welfare e?ects of self-employment apart from its monetary aspects, and focuses on the...

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...