We examine the impact of management practices on firm performance among SMEs in Britain over the period 2011-2014, using a unique dataset which links survey data on management practices with firm performance data from the UK's official business register. We find that SMEs are less likely to use...

Entrepreneurship, being largely an urban phenomenon, co-evolves over time with cities. While this relationship is like a 'horse and carriage', it is not a straightforward one, more akin to 'love and marriage'. In this paper I explore the co-evolution of entrepreneurship and cities. First, I...

Since Chinese government initiated economic reform in the late 1970s, entrepreneurship and private sectors have emerged gradually and played an increasingly important role in promoting economic growth. However, entrepreneurship is distributed unevenly in China. Using micro data from 2008...

The impact of the incumbent state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on the births of new private-owned enterprises (POEs) in China is a central concern for the government and society. In this paper, we apply agglomeration theories to distinguish the linkages between SOEs and POEs. Using China's 2008...

In this paper we will look at job creation and destruction in firms. We will answer the question if it is the large companies that create jobs, while the smaller companies are contributing much less. Or is it the young companies that create jobs? And who destroys the most jobs? In the crisis...

This paper studies the impact of diversity in cognitive ability among members of a team on their performance. We conduct a large field experiment in which teams start up and manage real companies under identical circumstances. Exogenous variation in – otherwise random – team composition is...

One of the most salient and relevant dimensions of team heterogeneity is ethnicity. We measure the causal impact of ethnic diversity on the performance of business teams using a randomized field experiment. We follow 550 students who set up 45 real companies as part of their curriculum in an...

Analyzing data on all U.S. employers in a cohort of entering firms, we document a highly skewed size distribution, such that the largest 5% account for over half of cohort employment at firm birth and more than two-thirds at firm age 7. Little of the size variation is accounted for by industry...

Policy makers find it difficult to promote economic development through entrepreneurship and SMEs. In this paper we argue that this is because the positive impact of entrepreneurship is overestimated and its negative impact underestimated. It is moreover also because there is no unified...

Previous empirical studies have shown that solo entrepreneurs benefit from having balanced skills: Jacks-of-All-Trades (JATs) are better entrepreneurs than specialists are. Nowadays however, the majority of entrepreneurs start up and run ventures together in teams.In this paper we test whether...