In this paper we investigate the relationship between females among the first hires of start-up companies and business success. Our results show that firms with female first hires have a higher share of female workers at the end of the first year after entry. Further, we find that firms with...

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is not only a transfer of capital, but a complex bundle of capital and firm-specific assets like production and management know-how. In particular, the transfer of production know-how improves overall productivity of FDI-receiving firms and to some extent also...

Using data on large and medium sized Austrian manufacturing firms this paper analyzes empirically in which way a high degree of export orientation and foreign production abroad, as two modes of serving foreign markets, are related to the growth performance of domestic production. Robust median...

The evolution of higher moments of the firm size distribution so far seems to be neglected in the empirical firm growth literature. Based on GMM estimates, this paper introduces simple Wald tests to investigate whether the firm size distribution converges in both the second and third central...

Based on a structural model for initial firm size, survival and firm growth we estimate firm-specific transition probabilities between size classes of the firm size distribution. This allows an assessment of the impact of different (counterfactual) economic policy measures on intra-distribution...

This paper shows that applying simple employment-weighted OLS estimation to Davis - Haltiwanger - Schuh (1996) firm level job creation rates taking the values 2 and -2 for entering and exiting firms, respectively, provides biased and inconsistent parameter estimates. Consequently, we argue that...

The availability of affordable institutional child-care is increasingly discussed as an important determinant of the labour force participation of parents, particularly of mothers. This paper examines the impact of child-care costs on the employment rates of mothers with children younger than 15...