An International Cohort Comparison of Size Effects on Job Growth
47 Pages Posted: 12 Jan 2015
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An International Cohort Comparison of Size Effects on Job Growth
An International Cohort Comparison of Size Effects on Job Growth
Date Written: October 1, 2014
Abstract
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 firms born in 1998 over their first decade of life, using variation across half a dozen northern European countries Austria, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the UK to pin down size effects. We find that a very small proportion of the smallest firms play a crucial role in accounting for cross-country differences in job growth. A closer analysis reveals that the initial size distribution and survival rates do not seem to explain job growth differences between countries, rather it is a small number of rapidly growing firms that are driving this result.
Keywords: birth cohort; firm age; firm size; firm survival; firm growth; distributed micro-data analysis
JEL Classification: L25; L26; E24; M13
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