Public policy is currently shifting from SME policy towards entrepreneurship policy, which supports entrepreneurship without directing attention to quantitative goals and specific firms or employment groups. The institutional framework set by public policy affects the prevalence and performance...

The paper quantifies the role of factors associated with the growth (or decline) of micro and small businesses in European economies. The growth is related to employment and value added in enterprises as well as to ten institutional variables. We test the data for consistency of behavioural...

This paper is a primer on corporate performance, corporate governance, and their interrelationships and measurement systems, with particular focus on Small and Medium- Sized Enterprises (SMEs). This is the first report of a larger on going research project. In the domain of performance...

Small and medium enterprises are an important factor in the East African economies especially with respect to employment. The increasing competition through globalisation puts them under considerable pressure. Through the rapid spread of information and communication technologies (ICT) and ever...

This paper focuses on a new concern in the small firm’s literature, namely what makes a small firm stay in business for a long time. It reflects a change in economic policy, away from an emphasis on volume of start-ups to an emphasis on quality of start-ups. The basic hypothesis is that...

We investigate the manifold posed question: To what extent does investment in human and social capital, besides the effect of talent, enhance entrepreneurial performance? We distinguish between three different performance measures: survival, profits, and generated employment. On the basis of the...

Little empirical evidence provides insight in person-oriented drivers of business survival and success of small business owners. In this paper I perform a duration analysis of business survival amongst young white (selfemployed) small business owners in the U.S. Compulsory exits are...

This paper analyses the effect of risk attitudes of firm owners on profits among micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in Lagos, Nigeria. Higher risk perceptions are shown to have a significant positive effect on profits, whereas risk propensity has a negative or no effect. Education, age, being...

We consider a competitive extraction industry comprising many small firms, each with a slightly different quality of mineral holdings. With "rapidly" declining quality of holding per firm we observe rent declining over and interval. We do not work with the planning solution, commonly invoked in...

This paper studies the serial autocorrelation of annual growth rates in employment for selected Austrian service industries over a 30-year period using quantile regression techniques. The autocorrelation of growth rates provides important information on firms growth processes. We find that the...