| Abstract: |
This study examines serial correlation in employment, sales and innovative
sales growth rates in a balanced panel of 3,300 Spanish firms over the years
2002-2009, obtained by matching different waves of the Spanish Encuesta sobre
Innovacion en las Empresas, the Spanish innovation survey conducted annually
by the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE). The main objective is to
verify whether the changes (increase/decrease) in these figures are persistent
over time, whether such persistence (if any) differs between SMEs and larger
firms, and if it is affected by a firm's age. To do so, we adopted a
semi-parametric quantile regression approach. This methodology is well suited
to cases where outliers (high-growth firms) are the subject of investigation
and/or when they have to be assumed as being very heterogeneous. Empirical
results indicate that among those innovative firms experiencing high
employment growth, the smaller and younger grow faster than larger firms, but
the jobs they create are not persistent over time. However, while being
smaller and younger helps growing more in terms of employment and sales, it is
not an advantage when innovative sales growth is considered: in this case
larger firms experience faster growth. |