It is often claimed that small and young firms account for a disproportionately large share of net employment growth. We conduct a meta analysis of the empirical evidence regarding whether net employment growth rather is generated by a few rapidly growing firms – so-called Gazelles – that...

In this paper we ask whether the withdrawal of a major employer (Pharmacia) from a region in Sweden (Uppsala) has had a negative effect on employment growth. We explore the possibility that the exit of Pharmacia may not have had a negative effect on the total employment in the region. It might...

Gibrat’s Law predicts that firm growth is a purely random effect and therefore should be independent of firm size. The purpose of this paper is to test Gibrat’s law within the retail industry, using a novel data-set comprising all Swedish limited liability companies active at some point...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if the industry context matters for whether Gibrat's law is rejected or not using a dataset that consists of all limited firms in 5-digit NACE-industries in Sweden during 1998-2004. The results reject Gibrat's law on an aggregate level, since small...

We use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness study (GLOBE) for 42 countries to investigate how the effects of individual’s self-efficacy and fear of failure on entrepreneurial entry are contingent on national...

The purpose of this paper is to distinguish between the determinants of new start-ups and in migration of firms using a data-set that covers 13,471 limited liability firms in the Swedish wholesale trade industries during the period 2000- 2004. Our results indicate that the presence of a...

This paper examines how institutional investors influence investment decisions and returns on investment. To measure investment performance we used a measure of marginal q which measures the ratio of the investment returns to cost of capital. Institutional owners are found to have had a positive...

We propose that the legal origin explanation of differences in financial indicators lacks the ability to satisfyingly describe investment performance and firm size effects. In this paper we investigate the impact of legal origin and firm size on investment performance for 20 111 firms in 58...

This paper empirically examines industry determinants of the shape of Swedish firm size distributions at the 3-digit (NACE) industry level between 1999-2004 for surviving firms. Recent theoretical studies have begun to develop a better understanding of the causal mechanisms behind the shape of...

This paper investigates the role(s) of high-growth firms (HGFs) in the robust growth-rate distribution. HGFs are identified as firms for which the growth-rate distribution exhibits power-law decay. In contrast to the traditional means of identifying HGFs, a distributional approach eliminates the...