Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/104717 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
ZEW Discussion Papers No. 14-102
Publisher: 
Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW), Mannheim
Abstract: 
The contribution of different-sized businesses to job creation continues to attract policymakers' attention, however, it has recently been recognized that conclusions about size were confounded with the effect of age. We probe the role of size, controlling for age, by comparing the cohorts of firms born in 1998 over their first decade of life, using variation across half a dozen northern European countries Austria, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the UK to pin down size effects. We find that a very small proportion of the smallest firms play a crucial role in accounting for cross-country differences in job growth. A closer analysis reveals that the initial size distribution and survival rates do not seem to explain job growth differences between countries, rather it is a small number of rapidly growing firms that are driving this result.
Subjects: 
birth cohort
firm age
firm size
firm survival
firm growth
distributed micro-data analysis
JEL: 
L25
L26
E24
M13
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.