Business experience and start-up size: buying more lottery tickets next time around?

This paper explores the determinants of start-up size by focusing on a cohort of 6247 businesses that started trading in 2004, using a unique dataset on customer records at Barclays Bank. Quantile regressions show that prior business experience is significantly related with start-up size, as are a number of other variables such as age, education and bank account activity. Quantile treatment effects (QTE) estimates show similar results, with the effect of business experience on (log) start-up size being roughly constant across the quantiles. Prior personal business experience leads to an increase in expected start-up size of about 50%. Instrumental variable QTE estimates are even higher, although there are concerns about the validity of the instrument

Do more heavily regulated economies have poorer performing new ventures? Evidence from Britain and Spain

We test two alternative perspectives on the start-up size and subsequent growth of new firms in a heavily regulated (HR) economy and a lightly regulated (LR) economy. The first argues that, in an HR economy, there will be fewer new firms, and those that do start will be larger than those in an LR economy, but they will grow more slowly. A second perspective is that regulation does not influence the scale of entrepreneurship - merely its distribution between that which is registered and that which is not registered. Using parallel datasets for HR Spain and LR Britain we find some support for both perspectives. Specifically we find that registered new firms in Britain do start smaller than in Spain and do grow faster. However, when both registered and unregistered firms are included, these differences disappear