The present paper sheds light on how growth of young firms is affected by expansive strategies and the socioeconomic heritage of their main actors. "Socioeconomic heritage" has to do with socialization, prior socioeconomic circumstances, and regional growth conditions; the term is elaborated upon and further defined in this study. The empirical analysis is carried out both for West Germany - a mature market economy - and for East Germany, which operated under a centrally planned economy until German reunification in 1990. The main finding of the paper is that the involvement of West Germans in East German start-ups has a favourable effect on these firms' chances to grow rapidly. This effect is attributed to the fact that West Germans are more likely to possess person-related and situation-related factors necessary for growing a business in a market economy. The results are more ambiguous as to the influence of expansive strategies on fast growth.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Max-Planck-Institute of Economics, Thueringer Universitaets- und Landesbibliothek in its series Jena Economic Research Papers in Economics with number
2009-092.
Did you know? Citation analysis on IDEAS includes online papers that are freely accessible and whose text could be automatically analyzed, currently about 210000 papers.