Did firm age, experience, and access to finance count? SME performance after the global financial crisis

Cowling, Marc; Liu, Weixi; Zhang, Ning

Abstract

© 2017, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. This paper examines the relationships between firm age and entrepreneurs experience on SME performance after the 2008/09 global financial crisis. We find that in general the crisis had a long-lasting scarring effect on the SME sector, but there is evidence of some recovery in performance. Interestingly, the well-established, and negative, firm age-growth relationship still holds, but entrepreneurial experience did not have any substantive effects on small business performance. Our findings suggest that the severity of the crisis meant that previous entrepreneur experiences had little value in this unique and uncertain environment. However, young firms still accounted for a disproportionately high share of growth, especially among the fastest growing firms.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 1, 2017
• Online Publication Date: May 10, 2017
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2018
• Deposit Date: Apr 16, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: May 10, 2018
• Journal: Journal of Evolutionary Economics
• Print ISSN: 0936-9937
• Electronic ISSN: 1432-1386
• Publisher: Springer (part of Springer Nature)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 28
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 77-100
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-017-0502-z
• Keywords: firm age, entrepreneurs experience, job dynamics, sales dynamics, financial crisis
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/872587
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-017-0502-z
• Additional Information: Additional Information : The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-017-0502-z.
• Contract Date: Apr 16, 2018