High-growth firms and productivity:evidence from the United Kingdom

Abstract There is considerable evidence that high-growth firms (HGFs) contribute significantly to employment and economic growth. However, the literature so far does not adequately explore the link between HGFs and productivity. This paper investigates the empirical link between total factor productivity (TFP) growth and HGFs, defined in terms of sales growth, in the United Kingdom over the period 2001-2010, by examining two related research questions. Firstly, does higher TFP growth lead to HGF status and secondly, does HGF experience help firms achieve faster TFP growth? Our findings reveal that firms in both the manufacturing and services sectors are more likely to become HGFs when they exhibit higher TFP growth. In addition, firms that have had HGF experience tend to enjoy faster TFP growth following the high-growth episodes. Policy implications are drawn based on the self-reinforcing process of the high-growth phenomenon that is revealed by our results

Hernando de Soto: recipient of the 2017 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research

The 2017 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research is given to Hernando de Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, Peru. Over the last 30 years, Hernando de Soto has been a world-leading intellectual engaged in academic and public policy discussions on global development. He has made substantial contributions to our understanding of the informal economy and of the importance of property rights to unleash entrepreneurship and alleviate poverty and underdevelopment. His contributions have led to a new and better understanding of the role played by institutions in supporting entrepreneurship, especially in the Third World. Hernando de Soto’s work has also had major influences on policy worldwide, both in terms of conceptual understanding and practical policy measures

Cross-Border Acquisitions and Corporate Taxes: Efficiency and Tax Revenues

We find that reduced foreign corporate taxes may lead to inefficient foreign acquisitions if complementarities between foreign and domestic assets are low, and to efficient foreign acquisitions if such complementarities are high. Moreover, with large complementarities, foreign acquisitions can increase domestic tax revenues. The reason is that in the bidding competition between the foreign firms, all benefits from the acquisition, including tax advantages and evaded taxes, are competed away and captured by the domestic seller which, in turn, pays capital gains tax on the proceeds. Technical issues in the tax code, such as the treatment of goodwill deductibility, is also shown to crucially affect the pattern of foreign acquisitions

Fiscal Illusion and Fiscal Obfuscation: An Empirical Study of Tax Perception in Sweden

In this paper we present survey evidence suggesting that there exists a sizeable fiscal illusion amongst the general public in Sweden. Respondents in a nation-wide and representative survey systematically underestimate the share of an ordinary workers income that is transferred to the public sector. Furthermore, we make a theoretical distinction between tax illusion and fiscal obfuscation, a proposed novel type of fiscal illusion. It has previously been assumed that fiscal illusion derives from a fragmentized tax system with many small, and largely invisible, taxes which tend to be ignored or underestimated by the tax payers. We hypothesize that this systematic bias could in addition emanate from misapprehensions of the real incidence of a tax. Evidence is presented that this could apply even when taxes are few and large, contrary to the tax complexity hypothesis. When this misperception derives from seemingly deliberate tax design and tax labeling, as appears to be the case with the payroll taxes in Sweden, we call it fiscal obfuscation

Enterprises in the Philippines: Dynamism and Constraints to Employment Growth

This paper seeks to analyze the factors affecting the growth of enterprises in the Philippines, as measured from the expansion of employment. The paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it attempts to provide a comprehensive background of the various policies and legislations that affect firms in the country. Second, using micro-level data of the firms in 2009, we correlate the observed growth of these firms with reported constraints in the business environment within which these firms operate, to investigate which ones are binding constraints. We find significant correlations between a subset of these indicators of business climates and the issues raised in previous literature, and the effects vary across firms of different sizes. Given the challenging global climate in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, more than a third of these firms expanded their payroll and majority saw growth in real sales. Amidst a sea of subjective self-reported responses, we manage to find certain empirical regularities that withstand a battery of robustness checks. These correlations between a subset of indicators for business climates and the growth or expansion of firms may shed some light on future potential policies to assist these firms, as well as provide directions for further research

The influence of organizational culture and climate on entrepreneurial intentions among research scientists

Over the past decades, universities have increasingly become involved in entrepreneurial activities. Despite efforts to embrace their ‘third mission’, universities still demonstrate great heterogeneity in terms of their involvement in academic entrepreneurship. This papers adopts an institutional perspective to understand how organizational characteristics affect research scientists’ entrepreneurial intentions. Specifically, we study the impact of university culture and climate on entrepreneurial intentions, including intentions to spin off a company, to engage in patenting or licensing and to interact with industry through contract research or consulting. Using a sample of 437 research scientists from Swedish and German universities, our results reveal that the extent to which universities articulate entrepreneurship as a fundamental element of their mission fosters research scientists’ intentions to engage in spin-off creation and intellectual property rights, but not industry-science interaction. Furthermore, the presence of university role models positively affects research scientists’ propensity to engage in entrepreneurial activities, both directly and indirectly through entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Finally, research scientists working at universities which explicitly reward people for ‘third mission’ related output show higher levels of spin-off and patenting or licensing intentions. This study has implications for both academics and practitioners, including university managers and policy makers