Empresas de Base Tecnológica: Identificação, Sobrevivência e Morte

The last decade witnessed a change in the view of the economic literature on smallfirms. If before they were perceived as inefficient in terms of productivity and wages,once operating in a suboptimum scale, in the last decade they turned out to be facedas agents of technological change, crucial for the creation and the commercializationof new knowledge. This new agreement came to spread out in literature the New Technology-Based Firms. However, in the same way that these firms may act as changeagents, one also perceives that it has a great turnover between them, with subsequententrances and exits. By this way, it the was traced as the objective of this work theidentification of parallels between the theory of the firm survival and the performanceof the Brazilian NTBFs. Confronting the performance of the NTBFs created between1994 and 2001 to the one of the universe of firms created in same period, twoconclusions were reached: (i) the rates of NTBFs death are inferior to the presentedby the whole group of firms until the fourth year, after which a convergence betweenthese taxes is witnessed; and (ii) the new NTBFs present a growth much more significantthan the other group. Still, on the basis of the survival analysis instrumentals,more three conclusions were drawn: (i) the NTBFs from sectors in expansion presentsuperior survival probability; (ii) a greater or minor competition does not help to explainthe NTBFs rates of death; and (iii) neither the size nor the growth of theNTBFs are relevant for its survival possibilities.