The Imprinting of Founders' Human Capital on Entrepreneurial Venture Growth: Evidence from New Technology-Based Firms

Luca Grilli, Paul Jensen and Samuele Murtinu

Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series from Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne

Abstract: This paper tests the presence of an ‘entrepreneurial imprinting effect’ of founders’ human capital on entrepreneurial ventures’ performance. More specifically, we empirically explore the impact of entrepreneurs’ human capital on a firm’s sales growth performance by disentangling the effect of the stock of human capital possessed at foundation from the potential injections and losses of human capital due to exit of founders and/or addition of new owner-managers in the entrepreneurial team over time. Our analysis is based on a panel dataset composed of 338 Italian new technology-based firms (NTBFs) observed from 1995 (or since their foundation) to 2008 (or until their exit from the dataset). We consider the effects of several dimensions of entrepreneurial human capital on firm sales growth and estimate Gibrat law-type dynamic panel data models using OLS estimator and GMM-system estimator to control for endogeneity. Overall, our results point to a positive and significant presence of an ‘entrepreneurial imprinting effect’ exerted by founders’ specific work experience on venture growth which is robust to a series of controls.

Keywords: Entrepreneurial ventures; imprinting effect; entrepreneurs’ human capital; firm growth; new technology-based firms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L25 L26 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2013-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-fdg, nep-hrm and nep-sbm
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/downloads ... series/wp2013n14.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:iae:iaewps:wp2013n14

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series from Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sheri Carnegie (melb-inst@unimelb.edu.au).