Persistence, survival, and growth: a closer look at 20 years of fast-growing firms in Austria

This article studies the survival, persistence, and growth of fast-growing firms after their fast-growth period, using an extensive data set of Austrian firms. We use two definitions to identify fast-growing firms. High-growth firms (HGF) are firms with the highest growth rates, while high-Birch firms (HBF) are the firms that contribute most to job creation. Matching as nonparametric preprocessing is used to construct control groups consisting of firms that were similar in terms of size, age, and industry affiliation to the fast-growing firms. We run survival, persistence, and growth regressions on the balanced data sets. The results point to differences between the two definitions but also show similarities in outcomes. We find that HBFs have a substantially larger probability of repeating their fast-growth event than HGFs. For survival we find small differences between the definitions. With regard to firm growth, we find that growth after the high-growth period is rather modest for both definitions when compared with the growth rates achieved during the fast-growth episode. However, both HBFs and HGFs have much higher growth rates than control firms.