@article{124fff4c08ac4ac4be3ff2a9375b4246,
title = "Innovation and firm growth: Does firm age play a role?",
abstract = "This paper explores the relationship between innovation and firm growth for firms of different ages. We hypothesize that young firms undertake riskier innovation activities which may have greater performance benefits (if successful), or greater losses (if unsuccessful). Using an extensive Spanish Community Innovation Survey sample for the period 2004-2012, we apply panel quantile regressions to study the effect of R&D activities on firm growth (i.e. sales growth, productivity growth and employment growth). Our results show that young firms face larger performance benefits from R&D at the upper quantiles of the growth rate distribution, but face larger decline at the lower quantiles. R&D investment by young firms therefore appears to significantly riskier than R&D investment by more mature firms, which suggests some policy implications.",
keywords = "Firm age, Firm growth, Innovation, Panel quantile regression, Post-entry growth, Scale-up",
author = "Alex Coad and Agust{\'i} Segarra and Mercedes Teruel",
note = "Funding Information: We are very much indebted to Tommaso Ciarli, Werner H{\"o}lzl, Jackie Krafft, Mariana Mazzucato, Rafael Myro, Mauro Napoletano, Paul Nightingale, Gabriele Pellegrino, Francesco Rentocchini, Maria Savona, Nick von Tunzelmann, as well as Keld Laursen (the editor) and several anonymous referees, and participants at SPRU seminar (15th May 2012), the Workshop on “Firm Growth and Innovation” (Tarragona 28th–29th June 2012), 2012 International Conference “The Governance of a Complex World” (Nice, 1st–3rd November 2012), and CONCORDi 2015 (JRC-IPTS, Seville, 1–2 October 2015. Alex Coad gratefully acknowledges financial support from the ESRC , TSB , BIS and NESTA on grants ES/H008705/1 and ES/J008427/1 as part of the IRC distributed projects initiative, as well as from the AHRC as part of the FUSE project. Agust{\'i} Segarra and Mercedes Teruel thank the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade for financial support. This paper is part of the research done with the financial support of the Ministry of Innovation and Science (project ECO2009-08735) and the Consolidated Group of Research 2009-SGR-907. We are grateful to Ver{\`o}nica Gombau for her research support. The views expressed are purely those of the authors and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission. The usual disclaimer applies. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.",
year = "2016",
month = mar,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1016/j.respol.2015.10.015",
language = "English",
volume = "45",
pages = "387--400",
journal = "Research Policy",
issn = "0048-7333",
publisher = "Elsevier",
number = "2",
}
