Assessing the determinants of fast growth in Italy

Alessandro Arrighetti and Andrea Lasagni

No 2010-EP07, Economics Department Working Papers from Department of Economics, Parma University (Italy)

Abstract: Few firms grow in a rapid way, but their contribution to employment growth is often impressive. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze both external and internal factors which can affect the probability of being a high-growth firm (HGF) in Italy. We found that HGFs are on average young firms and are present in different sectors, but the role of demand is important to understand their performance at sectoral level. Moreover, our findings show that financial constraints and profitability are not associated with the probability of being a fast-growing firm. HGFs, on average, are characterised by high productivity, but only when growth is measured in terms of sales. The most original results of this study concerns endogenous determinants of fast growth, which have not so far been adequately examined in the literature. First, we found that the concentration of ownership is important for HGFs that grow in sales. Second, the quality of human capital is a strong point for firms experiencing rapid employment growth.

Keywords: : high-growth firms; firm growth; human capital; rapid firm growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 L25 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-sbm
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.swrwebeco.unipr.it/RePEc/pdf/I_2010-07.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:par:dipeco:2010-ep07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Department Working Papers from Department of Economics, Parma University (Italy) Via J.F. Kennedy 6, 43100 PARMA (Italy). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Lasagni ().