Determinants and dimensions of firm growth

Gerrit de Wit and Haibo Zhou

No H200903, Scales Research Reports from EIM Business and Policy Research

Abstract: Firm growth is an important indicator of a thriving economy. Although the determinants of firm growth have been studied in various disciplines, an integrated analysis is still lacking. This paper attempts to provide such an analysis. Many determinants of firm growth are summarized and classified into three dimensions: individual, organizational, and environmental determinants. By conducting an empirical study using 523 Dutch small and medium sized firms, we identify the determinants of firm growth which is measured by employment growth. Our findings show that environmental determinants do not affect firm growth. Individual ones do: entrepreneurs with growth motivation and having technical knowledge are more likely to grow their firms while entrepreneurs characterized by a strong need of achievement are less likely to engage in firm growth. Organizational determinants have the most influence on firm growth: the older thefirm, the less likely it is to grow. Availability of financial capital is found to be crucial to firm growth. Finally, the firm’s scalability (its preparedness to grow) is found to have a positive impact on firm growth.

Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2009-03-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-fdg and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.entrepreneurship-sme.eu/pdf-ez/H200903.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eim:papers:h200903

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scales Research Reports from EIM Business and Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Webmaster EIM ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).