The Development and Survival of New Small Businesses: Empirical Evidence for Scotland 1994-97

Gavin Reid

CRIEFF Discussion Papers from Centre for Research into Industry, Enterprise, Finance and the Firm

Abstract: This paper has two goals. First, to provide an accurate characterisation of the new small firm in Scotland by reference to markets, finance, costs, business strategy, human capital, internal organisation and technical change. Second, to use these same features to discover salient differences between small firms which either survive or close, two or three years after inception. The empirical evidence is based on interview data from 150 entrepreneurs over a three year period. It was found that surviving firms were larger, better funded, lower geared, and more profit oriented. They also paid higher wages, and were both more attuned to, and realistic about, new technologies. The conclusion formed was that firms which survived generally displayed wider and deeper competencies than firms which closed.

Keywords: micro firms; business inception; business development; survival rates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 D21 D92 L22 M21 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/crieff/papers/dp9712.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/crieff/papers/dp9712.pdf [302 Found]--> https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/crieff/papers/dp9712.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:san:crieff:9712

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CRIEFF Discussion Papers from Centre for Research into Industry, Enterprise, Finance and the Firm Department of Economics, Castlecliffe, The Scores, St Andrews, KY16 9AZ. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Department of Economics, The University of St Andrews Business School ().