We relate innovation to sales growth for incumbent firms in four high-tech sectors. A firm, on average, experiences only modest growth and may grow for a number of reasons that may or may not be related to ‘innovativeness’. However, given that firms are heterogeneous and that growth rates...

This study analyses persistence in growth rates of the entire population of Dutch manufacturing firms. Previous literature on firm growth rates shows that extreme growth events are likely to be negatively correlated over time. A rebound effect following an extreme growth event questions the...

Serial correlation in annual growth rates carries a lot of information on growth pro-cesses – it allows us to directly observe firm performance as well as to test theories. Using a 7-year balanced panel of 10 000 French manufacturing firms, we observe that small firms typically are subject to...

This paper proposes a general framework to account for the divergent results in the empirical literature on the relation between firm sizes and growth rates, and on many results on growth autocorrelation. In particular, we provide an explanation for why traces of the LPE sometimes occur in...