This study investigates how local milieus foster innovation success of firms. We complement the common practice of linking firm performance indicators to regional characteristics with survey evidence on the perceived importance of locational factors. While the former approach assumes that...

We estimate the effects of R&D on firms' credit ratings and on financial distress. The main purpose is the comparison of firms in Western Germany and Eastern Germany as a transitional economy. Innovative activity has a positive impact on firm value proxied by ratings in Western Germany, but a...

The concept of knowledge has gained in interest since industrialized economics have induced a shift in importance from labor, capital and natural resources towards intellectual resources. This study investigates how the management of knowledge influences the innovation performance of a firm....

Do academic scientists bring valuable human capital to the companies they found or join? If so, what are the particular skills that compose their human capital and how are these skills related to firm performance? This paper examines these questions using a particular group of academic...

Our empirical literature review shows that little is known about how firm performance changes with age, presumably because of the paucity of data on firm age. For Spanish manufacturing firms, we analyse the firm performance related to firm age between 1998 and 2006. We find evidence that firms...

While several plots of the aggregate age distribution suggest that firm age is exponentially distributed, we find some departures from the exponential benchmark. At the lower tail, we find that very young establishments are more numerous than expected, but they face high exit hazards. At the...

While several plots of the aggregate age distribution suggest that firm age is exponentially distributed, we find some departures from the exponential benchmark. At the lower tail, we find that very young establishments are more numerous than expected, but they face high exit hazards. At the...

Recent research has led to the empirical regularity that firm growth rate distributions are heavy tailed. This finding implies that a few firms experience spectacular growth rates and decline, but that most firms have marginal growth rates. The literature on high growth firms shows that high...

This paper analyzes the relationship of ownership concentration and firm performance in the context of different institutional environments in 28 Central and Eastern European transition economies. Using the BEEPS data for the period from 2002 to 2009 we find an inverted u-shaped relation of...

Empirical work on micro and small firms has focused on developed countries. The little work that exists on developing countries is all too often based on small samples taken from ad hoc questionnaires. The census data we analyze are fairly representative of the structure of small business in...