We study the cyclical pattern of entrepreneurial activity. Results across 22 OECD countries for the period 1972-2007 show that entrepreneurial activity is a leading indicator of the business cycle in a Granger-causality sense. This contradicts existing theoretical hypotheses which predict that...

A large literature has emerged focusing on the post-entry performance of firms and, in particular, on the links between firm growth, survival, size and age. While these studies have resulted in findings that are sufficiently consistent as to constitute Stylized Facts, virtually all of these...

A recent literature has emerged providing compelling evidence that a major shift in the organization of the developed economies has been taking place: away from what has been characterized as the <I>managed economy</I> towards the <I>entrepreneurial economy</I>. In particular, the empirical evidence provides...</i></i>

This paper documents that a process of industrial restructuring has been transforming the developed economies, where large corporations are accounting for less economic activity and small firms are accounting for a greater share of economic activity. Not all countries, however, are experiencing...

Several surveys on intra-industry dynamics have recently reached the conclusion from a large body of evidence that Gibrat's Law does not hold, i.e., the main finding is that firm growth decreases with firm size. However, almost all of these studies have been based on manufacturing. In this paper...

The purpose of this paper is to show how institutional and evolutionary economics provide better insights as to why some firms survive and others do not than does neoclassical economics. At the heart of the evolutionary theory is the view that new firms are a manifestation of diversity and that...

n this paper, we develop two hypotheses: First, regional innovation efforts have a positive impact on regional knowledge based entrepreneurial activity. Second, knowledge based entrepreneurship positively affects regional economic performance. We test these hypotheses using county level data...

Despite the pervasive phenomenon of scale economies the majority of firms has always been small firms. The emergence of small firms as a means of economic development on both sides of the Atlantic has been one of the major new topics of economic policy since the 1980s. This has drawn renewed...