Among 205,322 limited liability firms in Sweden during 1997-2010, more than 10% did not hire new employees in any given 3-year period despite having high profits. Nearly one-third continued to have high profits in the next three-year period, but still no growth. Regression analysis indicates...

A natural experiment is used to identify the causal relationship between employment protection legislation and firm growth. The natural experiment occurred in Sweden in 2001, when an exemption made it possible for firms with less than eleven employees to exclude two workers from the...

Gibrat’s Law predicts that firm growth is a purely random effect and therefore should be independent of firm size. The purpose of this paper is to test Gibrat’s law within the retail industry, using a novel data-set comprising all Swedish limited liability companies active at some point...

It is frequently argued that policymakers should target high-tech firms, i.e., firms with high R&D intensity, because such firms are considered more innovative and therefore potential fast-growers. This argument relies on the assumption that the association among high-tech status, innovativeness...

Gibrat’s law predicts that firm growth is purely random and should be independent of firm size. We use a random effects–random coefficient model to test whether Gibrat’s law holds at the firm level in the Swedish energy market. No study has investigated whether Gibrat’s law holds for...

Empirical studies demonstrate that most net job-growth originates from a small number of high-growth firms (HGFs). The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether firm ownership – family, or private non-family – matters for being a HGF, using data covering all firms in Sweden during...