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...

We test the industry life cycle hypothesis for 205 industries in West Germany between 1976 and 2009. In particular we analyse whether population indicators follow a cyclical path. Using a novel non-linear regression approach to identify life cycles we find that the number of establishments,...

Firm growth is an essential feature of market economies, shaping together macroeconomic performance and the evolution of industry structures. As a potential indicator of organizational "fitness" within a competitive environment, firm growth is also a central concern to both the practice and...

The contribution of different-sized businesses to job creation continues to attract policymakers’ attention, however, it has recently been recognized that conclusions about size were confounded with the effect of age. We probe the role of size, controlling for age, by comparing the cohorts of...

Empirical work studying the industry life cycle highlights the role of knowledge in various forms on the durations firms survive in the industry. This research leaves open the influence of historical events, which are reflected in macroeconomic factors like income, inflation, exports and...