This paper contributes to the understanding of how small firms are organized and managed. It tests an entrepreneur-worker matching model in small entrepreneurial firms. The model contemplates the existence of complementarities between workers’ and entrepreneur’s skills. Using a Portuguese...

It is widely accepted that countries with sound formal and informal institutions create more robust environments for firm performance. However, due to the liabilities faced by firms without available slack and/or market power, we contend that institutions are especially important for new and...

Are smaller firms more productive? Intuitively, while small firms have the advantage of more flexible management and lower response time to market changes, larger firms have the advantages of economies of scale, political clout and better access to government credits, contracts and licenses,...

Small firms are important drivers of employment creation and innovation. Dismissal protection raises firms’ adjustment costs and thus reduces worker flows. In many countries, small firms are exempted from dismissal protection regulations in order to increase their flexibility. This paper...

High performance work practices (HPWPs) are human resource management practices aimed at stimulating employee and organisational performance. The application of HPWPs is not widespread in small organisations. We examine whether the implementation of coherent bundles of HPWPs (aimed at employee...

It is known that small firms rely mainly on the CEO’s individual knowledge for developing innovations. Recent work suggests that this approach is inefficient since it underutilizes other employees’ knowledge. We study to which extent using CEOs, managers and non-managerial employees’ ideas...

Firm data from ten Western European countries is used in this paper to contrast the sources of leverage across small and large, as well as across listed and unlisted firms. Specifically, the explanatory power of firm-specific, country of incorporation institutional, and macroeconomic factors is...

The purpose of this article 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 five-digit NACE-industries in Sweden during 1998–2004. The results reject Gibrat’s law on an aggregate level,...