ÔThis collection of articles by an internationally recognized team of authors is a welcome addition to the literature on firm growth. The authors, singly and together, have previously made important contributions with regard to frameworks for understanding growth, as well as cutting-edge empirical research on the actual growth process. In this volume, the authors bring previous research up-to-date, providing a critical look at what has been published in the last decade and offering new theoretically informed insights in how and why firms grow.Õ Ð Howard Aldrich, University of North Carolina, US This insightful volume presents a collection of cutting-edge works by two of the leading researchers of firm growth. The studies extend previous research by providing stronger theoretical underpinnings and using longitudinal databases that can separate in time the firmsÕ growth from its presumed causes. They also break new ground by examining different modes of growth, such as sales growth vs. employment growth, and organic growth vs. acquisition-based expansion. Further, the studies investigate the drivers of firm growth and take a critical look at the effects, such as under what circumstances high growth is associated with high profitability. The issue of how firm growth is achieved and managed, and what consequences it has for different stakeholders is both theoretically interesting and practically important. The book will strongly appeal to academics of entrepreneurship, small business management and strategy.

Research into firm growth has been accumulating at a terrific pace, and Alex Coad s survey of this multifaceted field provides a detailed, comprehensive overview of the latest developments. Much progress has been made in empirical research into firm growth in recent decades due to factors such as the availability of detailed longitudinal datasets, more powerful computers and new econometric techniques. This book provides an up-to-date catalogue of empirical work, as well as a coherent theoretical structure within which these new results can be interpreted and understood. It brings together a large body of recent research on firm growth from a multidisciplinary perspective, providing an up-to-date synthesis of stylized facts and empirical regularities. Numerous empirical findings and theories of firm growth are also surveyed and compared in order to evaluate their validity. Drawing on a vast and diverse body of research, this book will prove invaluable to students, academics, policy makers and practitioners with a need to keep abreast of studies in industrial organization, firm growth and management.

Exploring the relationships between the growth of firms and entrepreneurship, the authors have drawn on many individual projects & case studies to provide a comprehensive analysis.

Small Firm Growth comprehensively reviews the empirical literature on small firm growth to highlight and integrate what is known about this phenomenon and take stock of what past experiences of researching this area implies for how the phenomenon can or should be studied in future research.

This book explores the conditions for growth that can create value for shareholders, focusing on the main strategies adopted by firms including horizontal expansion, vertical integration and product diversification. To evaluate whether or not a particular growth strategy is successful, the author examines the economic fundamentals of each strategy and presents analytical models of both internal development and external acquisition. He moves on to present four case studies of successful companies to highlight how a firm chooses and implements a defined growth strategy. This stimulating integrated analysis will appeal to researchers and students in business administration as well as managers, entrepreneurs and consultants involved in strategic management.--publisher description.

Remarkably, a small fraction of firms account for most of the job and output creation in high-income and developing countries alike. Does this imply that the path to enabling more economic dynamism lies in selectively targeting high-potential firms? Or would pursuing broad-based reforms that minimize distortions be more effective? Inspired by these questions, this book presents new evidence on the incidence, characteristics, and drivers of high-growth firms based on in-depth studies of firm dynamics in Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Tunisia, and Turkey. Its findings reveal that high-growth firms are not only powerful engines of job and output growth but also create positive spillovers for other businesses along the value chain. At the same time, the book debunks several myths about policies to support firm dynamism that focus on outward characteristics, such as firm size, sector, location, or past performance. Its findings show that most firms struggle to sustain rapid rates of expansion and that the relationship between high growth and productivity is often weak. Consequently, the book calls for a shift toward policies that improve the quality of firm growth by supporting innovation, managerial skills, and firms’ ability to leverage global linkages and agglomeration. To help policy makers structure policies that support firm growth, the book proposes a new ABC framework of growth entrepreneurship: improving Allocative efficiency, encouraging Business-to-business spillovers, and strengthening firm Capabilities. This book is the third volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers. 'Policy makers often get carried away by the disproportionate contributions of high-growth firms to job and output growth and commit to pursuing policies targeting the potential ‘stars.’ This book separates fact from fiction underpinning such interventions through a comprehensive analysis of high-growth firms across a range of developing countries, making a compelling argument that public policy to pick prospective winners is neither possible nor desirable. Policy makers would be wise to consult its arguments and policy advice when designing the next generation of policies to support the growth of firms.' William R. Kerr Professor of Business Administration, Harvard University; author of The Gift of Global Talent: How Migration Shapes Business, Economy and Society 'How to ignite and sustain high firm growth has eluded both economic analysis and thought leaders in policy and business. Through its meticulous and thoughtful analysis, this important new book provides a tractable framework to guide policy to harness the growth and productivity potential of firms in the developing-country context.' David Audretsch Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Development Strategies, Indiana University .

Why do most new firms which survive not grow while a handful grow sporadically, and rare outliers grow disproportionately? The prolific multi-disciplinary firm growth literature offers limited, disjointed, and inconclusive explanations of new venture growth. This dissertation, structured in three essays, examines the under-investigated nonlinear processes and outcomes of growth in new firms from different angles. In the first essay, the notion of new firm growth is explored from a theoretical perspective and a novel overarching conceptualization is proposed that spans across different theoretical lenses and levels of analysis. Reconciling different theoretical approaches is important because no single theory developed so far singlehandedly offers a comprehensive explanation as to why new firm growth is rare, sporadic, and highly skewed. By reframing the Penrose resource logic of firm growth as a system of process-outcome interactions and making use of organizational theories of change to further characterize these interactions, the essay proposes that nonlinear patterns of resource accumulation within and across new firms arise from feedback loops between teleological, evolutionary, and dialectical mechanisms of organizational change. This allows to reconcile three seemingly juxtaposing theoretical perspectives on the causality of firm growth being deterministic, voluntaristic or stochastic Firm-level growth nonlinearities are explored empirically in the second essay by testing the assumption of non-linear effects of resources on new firm growth. Emphasis is placed on financial resources, because they are foundational to acquiring other forms of resources, are highly versatile and comparable across industries and settings. Competing hypotheses of a positive linear, negative linear and curvilinear effect of financial resources on early growth outcomes in new firms are tested by aggregating meta-analytic evidence across a sample of published studies. By rejecting the linear positive and linear negative hypotheses and confirming the curvilinear relationship, the findings indicate more nuanced effects of versatile resources on growth in the uncertain context of new firms than prominently considered in resource-based literature. In the final essay, population-level nonlinearities of growth are studied by exploring under which conditions a parsimonious process whereby new firms allocate resources to pursue uncertain opportunities may explain the empirical regularities (rare, sporadic, and highly skewed) of new firm growth and result in a heavy-tailed distribution of growth outcomes across a population of new firms. Using an agent-based simulation, we also control for key parameters potentially influencing the process. Closest alignment of the proposed process with empirical regularities is found when (i) founding sizes of new firms are normally distributed, (ii) new firms follow bounded rationality rules to select which uncertain opportunities to pursue rather than randomly pick them, and (iii) the degree of uncertainty affecting opportunities is low to moderate. These findings shed new light on other generative mechanisms of growth and heavytailed firm size distributions considered in literature. The essay also introduces novel operationalizations of important theoretical constructs in entrepreneurship literature: opportunity, uncertainty, and product market fit