Standard regression techniques are only able to give an incomplete picture of the relationship between subjective well-being and its determinants since the very idea of conventional estimators such as OLS is the averaging out over the whole distribution: studies based on such regression...

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...

The purpose of this paper is to study who high- growth firms (HGFs) hire using a matched employer-employee dataset for all knowledge intensive industries in Sweden, where high growth is measured over the period 1999-2002. The results indicate that HGFs to a larger extent employ young people,...

Inter-firm competition has received much attention in the theoretical literature, but recent empirical work suggests that the growth rates of rival firms are uncorrelated, and that firm growth can be taken as an essentially independent process. We begin by investigating the correlations of the...

Empirical models based on neoclassical theory predict that if investment is sensitive to current financial performance, this is a sign that something is 'wrong' and is to be regarded as a problem worthy of a policy intervention. Evolutionary theory, however, refers to the principle of 'growth of...

We survey the phenomenon of the growth of firms drawing on literature from economics, management and sociology. We begin with a review of empirical "stylised facts" before discussing theoretical contributions. Firm growth is characterized by a predominant stochastic element, making it difficult...

Serial correlation in annual growth rates carries a lot of information on growth processes - it allows us to directly observe firm performance as well as to test hypotheses. Using a 7-year balanced panel of 10 000 French manufacturing firms, we observe that small firms typically are subject to...

A robust feature of the corporate growth process is the Laplace, or symmetric exponential, distribution of firm growth rates. In this paper, we sketch out a class of simple theoretical models capable of explaining this empirical regularity. We do not attempt to generalize on where growth...

This paper offers many new insights into the processes of firm growth by applying a vector autoregression (VAR) model to longitudinal panel data on French manufacturing firms. We observe the co-evolution of key variables such as growth of employment, sales, gross operating surplus and labour...