IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/econjl/v132y2022i648p2767-2814..html

The Cultural Roots of Firm Entry, Exit and Growth

Author

Listed:
  • Katharina Erhardt
  • Simon Haenni

Abstract

Can culture explain persistent differences in economic activity among individuals and across regions? A novel measure of cultural origin enables us to contrast entrepreneurial activity of individuals located in the same municipality, but whose ancestors lived just on opposite sides of the Swiss language border in the eighteenth century. Individuals with ancestry from the German-speaking side create 20% more firms than those with ancestry from the French-speaking side. These differences persist over generations and independent of the predominant culture at the current location. Yet, founder’s ancestry does not affect exit or growth of newly founded firms, suggesting that preferences are pivotal.

Suggested Citation

  • Katharina Erhardt & Simon Haenni, 2022. "The Cultural Roots of Firm Entry, Exit and Growth," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 132(648), pages 2767-2814.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:132:y:2022:i:648:p:2767-2814.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueac029
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Victor Gay, 2023. "Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs, Work, and Fertility. A Verification and Reproduction of Fernández and Fogli (2009)," Post-Print hal-04194417, HAL.
    2. Cai, Yang & Zhu, Jiong, 2024. "Cooperative culture and the birth of modern enterprises in China: Evidence from the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 163(C).
    3. Wang, Yanbing & Schaub, Sergei & Wuepper, David & Finger, Robert, 2023. "Culture and agricultural biodiversity conservation," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    4. Ulrich Kaiser & Jose Mata, 2025. "Persistent gender attitudes and women entrepreneurship," Papers 2503.04435, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2025.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D22 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
    • L26 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Entrepreneurship
    • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
    • Z10 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:132:y:2022:i:648:p:2767-2814.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press or the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/resssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.