The role of employees for post-entry firm growth

Andreas Koch, Jochen Späth () and Harald Strotmann ()

Small Business Economics, 2013, vol. 41, issue 3, 733-755

Abstract: While the majority of existing studies on the determinants of post-entry firm growth focus on the role of the founders or on the impact of firm-specific characteristics, possible effects of the characteristics of a start-up’s workforce have been widely neglected to date. In this paper we examine the role of initial worker and job characteristics (e.g., qualification, age, workload, marginal employment) of start-ups for their post‐entry employment growth. The analyses are based upon a capacious panel dataset comprising a representative 50 % sample of establishments in Germany. Our empirical results show that, inter alia, high-skilled and young workers are conducive to growth in terms of both the number of employees and full-time equivalents. With respect to flexible work forms, however, establishments using part-time employment show higher post‐entry growth only in terms of total hours worked, but a significantly lower growth with respect to the number of employees. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Keywords: Start-ups; Post-entry performance; Firm growth; Human capital; Marginal employment; Germany; D22; J21; J24; L25; L26; M13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

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Working Paper: The Role of Employees for Post-Entry Firm Growth (2012)
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DOI: 10.1007/s11187-012-9456-6

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