Gazelles as job creators: a survey and interpretation of the evidence

By Magnus Henrekson, Dan Johansson. 2010

1,045 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is often claimed that small and young firms account for a disproportionately large share of net employment growth. We conduct a meta-analysis of the empirical evidence regarding whether net employment growth rather is generated by a few rapidly growing firms—so-called Gazelles—that are not necessarily small and young. Gazelles are found to be outstanding job creators. They create all or a large share of new net jobs. On average, Gazelles are younger and smaller than other firms, but it is young age more than small size that is associated with rapid growth. Gazelles exist in all industries. They seem not to be overrepresented in high-technology industries, but there is some evidence that they are overrepresented in services.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/849e7a48ccfc64a9263e8f69fece0c1e1b6538d6

Citations in the corpus

• Optimism and chance: The elephants in the entrepreneurship room (2011, unknown): “Variables relating to owner characteristics and enterprise strategies are then used to examine whether, individually or collectively, these differ between the two groups of firms (Henrekson and Johansson, 2010 and Wiklund et al., 2009 provide helpful overviews of this literature).”
• Myth-busting and entrepreneurship policy: the case of high growth firms (2017, unknown): “Such ‘job creation’ studies have helped to foster a burgeoning body of empirical research on HGFs (Henrekson and Johansson 2010), thus generating continued debate on their economic impact and the capability of policy makers to generate and support them (BERR 2008; Shane 2009; Greene 2012; Lee 2014;…”
• The Schumpeterian entrepreneur: a review of the empirical evidence on the antecedents, behaviour and consequences of innovative entrepreneurship (2017, unknown): “…1980, when Birch (1979) found empirical support demonstrating that small firms have a disproportional contribution to net job creation (Birch 1979, 1987; Davidsson, Lindmark, and Olofsson 1998; Henrekson and Johansson 2010; Neumark, Wall, and Zhang 2011; Haltiwanger, Jarmin, and Miranda 2013).”
• Stress Processes: An Essential Ingredient in the Entrepreneurial Process (2018, unknown): “As a matter of fact, only a small proportion of firms is successful in the sense that they grow substantially (Henrekson & Johansson, 2010).”
• Is the R&D behaviour of fast-growing SMEs different? Evidence from CIS III data for 16 countries (2008, unknown): “Birch 1981; Davidsson et al. 1998; Schreyer 2000; Henrekson and Johansson 2009 ).”
• Firm Growth: Empirical Analysis (2010, unknown): “Henrekson and Johansson (2010) claim on this basis that it is “misleading to nar-rowly focus on a particular piece of this process and to claim that it alone contributes a disproportionally large share of net job growth”(p. 15).”
• Age and firm growth. Evidence from three European countries (2013, unknown): “1 See, among others, the meta-analysis conducted by Henrekson and Johansson (2010).”
• Strategies for superior performance under adverse conditions: A focus on small and medium-sized high-growth firms (2014, unknown): “…and high-growth ones in particular, are critical to economic growth, given their capacity to create new jobs (Acs and Mueller, 2008; Acs et al., 2008; Henrekson and Johansson, 2010), sustain survival (Phillips and Kirchhoff, 1989)1 and mitigate recessionary pressures (Storey and Greene, 2010).”
• Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystems (2018, unknown): “…are based on the connection between high technology firms and entrepreneurship, following the recent research and policy attention that is increasingly focused on gazelles or high‐quality, high‐growth firms (Fazio, Guzman, Murray, & Stern, 2016; Guzman & Stern, 2016; Henrekson & Johansson, 2010).”
• High-growth firms and productivity: evidence from the United Kingdom (2015, unknown): “…firm unobserved heterogeneity, TFP growth loses its statistical significance in affecting the HGF-incidence among new firms in the manufacturing sector, which reflects the heterogeneous nature of new firms’ high productivity that has been found in the literature (Henrekson and Johansson, 2010a).”
• The Economic Contribution of High-Growth Firms: Do Policy Implications Depend on the Choice of Growth Indicator? (2014, unknown): “Following Capasso et al (2009), Hölzl (2011), and Daunfeldt and Halvarsson (2012), we estimate transition probabilities to analyze this question.”