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The effects of ownership concentration on firm performance usually considers two conflicting perspectives: monitoring and expropriation hypotheses. Past studies have produced mix findings. This study aims to shed light on this relationship by focusing on a specific measure of firm performance, firm growth. The moderating effect of industry growth in the aforementioned relationship is also considered, which advances knowledge on the role of moderators.

This study resorts to data from a sample of 21,476 Portuguese firms, which is examined using hierarchical linear modelling. This approach is adequate because the data has a hierarchical structure: the firms are nested within industries.

The results show that equity ownership concentration has a positive effect on firms’ growth and that industry growth amplifies this relationship. Ownership concentration can spur effective monitoring, thereby alleviating principal–agent conflicts of interest and speeding up decision-making, enabling timely competitive actions that promote growth.

The research conceives ownership structure in two groups. However, equity ownership concentration often acquires more complex shapes. In addition, the data used is from a single country.

The results show that firms pursuing growing strategies and operating in growing industries benefit from equity concentration.

Different from past studies, this study focuses on firm growth performance and considers the moderating effect of industry growth.

This paper aims to revisit the relationship between sales growth and profitability by exploring the direct and indirect effects of cost stickiness in the growth process. Cost stickiness refers to asymmetric variations of costs associated with increases and decreases in sales. Cost stickiness is analyzed as a strategic liability that negatively affects profitability because it contributes to organizational rigidity that causes opportunity costs.

The empirical design is based on a large sample of 65,599 French firms drawn from the Amadeus database and it covers the period 2010 to 2019. The authors take advantage of the presentation of expenses made by nature in Amadeus to calculate cost stickiness in a more direct way than what is commonly done in the literature. The authors use various regression models to test the hypotheses.

For firms that experience rapid growth in sales, cost stickiness has a positive moderating effect on the relation between sales growth and profitability because of a higher asset turnover efficiency. However, for firms that experience slow growth, no growth or a decrease in sales, cost stickiness plays a negative moderating effect on the relation between sales and profitability.

This work contributes to the discussion about the conditions under which high growth is associated with greater profitability and conceptualizes cost stickiness as a strategic liability. The empirical context, privately held firms, has been overlooked by previous research.

Research on high growth firms is booming yet a strong conceptual understanding of how these firms obtain (and sustain) rapid growth remains (at best) partial. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the role founders play in enabling episodes of rapid growth and how they help navigate this process.

This paper reports the findings from a qualitative study involving in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs enlisted onto a publicly funded high growth business accelerator programme in Wales. These interviews explored the causes of the firms rapid growth, their key growth trigger points and the organisational consequences of rapid growth.

The research reveals that periods of high growth are intrinsically and inextricably inter-linked with the entrepreneurial traits and capabilities of their founders coupled with their ability to “sense” and “seize” pivotal growth opportunities. It also demonstrates founder-level dynamic capabilities enable firms to capitalise on pivotal “trigger points” thereby enabling their progression to a new “dynamic state” in a firm’s temporal evolution.

The novel approach towards theory building deployed herein is the use of theoretical elaboration as means of extending important existing theoretical constructs such as growth “trigger points” and founder dynamic capabilities. To capitalise on these trigger points, founders have to undergo a process of “temporal transitioning” to effectively manage and execute the growth process in firms. The work also has important policy implications, underlining the need for more relational forms of support for entrepreneurial founders.

This study investigates the significance of trade credit (TC) as an alternative source of funding in financing the growth of financially dependent firms.

Panel data analysis using the difference generalized method of moments (GMM) and fixed-effects ordinary least squares (FE-OLS) is conducted on annual data from publicly listed firms across a number of developing economies. The data cover the period from 2003 to 2019.

The findings indicate that financially dependent firms rely on TC to manage their growth, especially when they have exhausted their debt capacity. This dependence on TC displays a cyclical pattern. As firms enhance their financial position, they tend to scale back their dependence. Nevertheless, firms with significant growth opportunities continue utilizing TC for at least two years after their initial identification as financially dependent.

The author's conclusion highlights that TC can be a valuable and accessible source of funding, especially in developing economies where the real sector may require alternative financing channels. Hence, TC has the potential to play a very significant role in financing corporate growth in these economies.

The current study adds to the existing body of literature by revealing that access to alternative sources of finance is also critical for firms that are dependent on external sources and for firms that have exhausted their financial debt capacity.

This study aims to investigate the tendency for firms, exhibiting an entrepreneurial spirit in their growth strategies, to engage in misconduct within the context of China's rapidly developing economy. The authors also examine how this relationship is influenced by governance mechanisms, specifically management shareholding and executive functional diversity. Furthermore, the authors explore the mediating roles of organizational complexity and performance pressure in linking entrepreneurial growth to firm misconduct. This research provides a novel perspective for understanding the impact of entrepreneurial growth on corporate ethical risks, and offers practical insights for maintaining ethical standards in firms during their pursuit of growth.

This study focuses on publicly traded, mature companies that exhibit an entrepreneurial inclination in their growth strategies, demonstrating entrepreneurial vigor through activities such as product innovation and market expansion. This exploration incorporates both theoretical and empirical approaches, scrutinizing A-share listed companies in China from 2008 to 2019. To validate the robustness of this study's findings, the authors have applied diverse methodologies such as propensity score matching, classification regression, and alternative indicator analysis.

This study found that the entrepreneurial growth-oriented strategy is positively related to firm misconduct. It also uncovers that governance mechanisms like management shareholding and executive functional diversity moderate this relationship. Moreover, organizational complexity and performance pressure partially mediate the relationship between an entrepreneurial growth strategy and firm misconduct.

For instance, more detailed categorization of corporate misconduct, based on punishment severity, could be explored. Additional characteristics like age, education, gender, and team/board diversity could help further understand the relationship between entrepreneurial growth strategy and misconduct. By addressing these limitations and exploring further avenues for research, the authors can deepen the understanding of this relationship and provide valuable insights for firms seeking to mitigate potential risks.

First, for regulators, shareholders, creditors and investors, knowing and understanding the relationship between growth-oriented strategies and corporate violations is helpful for them to scientifically evaluate the potential risks that may exist in the company, and can also carry out differentiated supervision on the company based on different types of company-oriented strategies. Second, when designing the corporate governance mechanism, listed companies should fully consider the role of management shareholding. Finally, executives should treat cross-functional experience dialectically, especially in growth oriented strategic companies.

This research provides a novel perspective for understanding the impact of entrepreneurial growth on corporate ethical risks, and offers practical insights for maintaining ethical standards in firms during their pursuit of growth.

This study stands out by examining the influence of entrepreneurial growth strategy on firm misconduct, thus enhancing previous studies that primarily centered on entrepreneurial start-ups. The authors offer a nuanced comprehension of the potential risks intrinsic to corporate entrepreneurship and highlight the crucial role of efficient governance structures in curbing corporate misbehavior while fostering entrepreneurial growth.

In theory, the impact of debt liquidity risk (DLR) on the firm's future growth is ambiguous. This study aims to examine the empirical relationship between the DLR and firms' growth rate using annual data for USA companies from 1976 to 2020.

Given the longitudinal nature of the data, the author uses OLS (ordinary least squares) regression methodology with fixed effects to control for unobserved characteristics that might affect the dependent variable. Instrument variable regression is also used to address the potential endogeneity problem.

The results show that firms having higher DLR, as proxied by more short-term debt, experience lower growth rate. An increase in firms' short-term debt decreases the firms' future growth rate as evidenced by lower assets, revenue and employee growth rate. Moreover, the authors' results show that small firms or firms with more investment opportunities grow fast if the firms take higher DLR. Finally, cyclical firms with higher DLR exhibit lower growth rate during the credit tighten period. The authors' results hold for both the pre-zero lower bound (ZLB) era and ZLB period.

To the authors' best knowledge, this is one of the earliest studies to carefully examine the effects of DLR on firms' growth rate. While prior research finds that firms with higher growth potential, measured by market-to-book (MTB) ratio, use more short-term debt, the authors' research directly addresses whether DLR affects firms' future growth rate. The authors’ findings also help explain why firms with high growth potential use more short-term debt.

This paper aims to explore the moderating effect of human capital in the form of a CEO’s educational background and firm age at the time of internationalization on growth and survival.

The research study is based on primary data gathered from 102 internationalized small and medium enterprises (SMEs) belonging to the engineering industry in Bangalore district, Karnataka, India.

The results reveal that human capital significantly improves sales growth but had no impact on the survival of internationalized SMEs.

The paper includes practical implications for the CEOs of SMEs to successfully strategize their efforts towards growth and survival in the international market.

This research study enhances the importance of human capital and its impact on the growth and survival of internationalized SMEs in the context of an emerging economy where research studies are limited and largely unexplored till date.

Previous evidence has shown a generally positive relationship between continuously developed innovation, known as innovation persistence and employment growth in firms. This study investigates whether firm size moderates this relationship and how, considering persistent product and process innovation.

The authors studied the influence of firm size on the relationship between innovation persistence and employment using a 10-year panel database of firms based on national innovation surveys. The authors consider firm size as sales and measure innovation persistence through the hazard rate of innovation spells. To assess the main model, they use a system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator.

The authors' main findings indicate that firm size negatively moderates the relationship between persistent innovation and employment growth. These results suggest that the positive effects of product and process persistent innovation on employment growth decrease as firm size increases. The authors also find evidence indicating that the moderator role of firm size is greater when firms innovate more persistently. Robustness tests with different specifications confirm the results.

The authors show that firm size negatively affects the strength of the relationship between innovation persistence and employment growth in product and process innovations. The authors also show that the moderator role of firm size is greater when firms are more persistent in generating product and process innovation. Additionally, using a panel dataset, they provide evidence from a sample of firms in a developing country where no studies on this matter have previously been conducted.

This paper explores key factors influencing high-performing, sustained growth, high-tech small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in South Korea.

A qualitative study is adopted to explore seventeen founder owner-managers of high-tech SMEs who sustained consistent employment growth, greater than the industry average, for seven years. Within the sample, those with higher (10% or over) employment compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) over this period are also compared to those with lower rates.

The study suggests that proactive approaches, such as flexible organization, risk management, fast decision-making and international market entry, are seen as important contributing factors to sustained growth. These findings contribute to a better theoretical and empirical understanding of sustained high-tech SME growth, in a country with a strong entrepreneurial and internationally competitive information technology sector. Also, collaboration across the SME was perceived as making an important contribution to staff development and growth, consistent with stewardship theory.

The sample is based on successful high-tech SMEs, so there are limitations in extrapolating results to other types of firms, sectors or countries.

Key factors identified in this study can be considered by entrepreneurs seeking to achieve sustainable business. These also provide improved understanding for policymakers into the complexity of factors related to sustained and high growth of technology-based SMEs, which many countries are keen to foster to aid national economic growth.

The research provides new evidence exploring the diverse perspectives of founder owner-managers, on the sustained growth and failure in South Korean high-tech SMEs, and how these have changed since the inception of their business.

The current paper extends previous studies on the match between CEO and firm and explores whether certain characteristics of young CEOs make them more desirable to young firms. Results in this paper will provide useful information to startup companies when they need to find managers leading the firms.

This study use a large sample of panel regression to study the match between CEOs and firm via a difference-in-differences approach.

The author finds that young firms hire a disproportionately higher percentage of young CEOs than established firms. Young firms led by young CEOs exhibit higher growth rates in sales and assets and invest more in capital expenditure and R&D activities than similar firms led by older CEOs. Young CEOs in young firms also receive higher compensation than both older CEOs working in young firms and young CEOs working in established firms.

There are many studies examining how CEO age affect their decision-making process. There are also many studies examining the differences between young firms and established firms. However, there is no study so far examining the intersection of the two questions above. Specifically, whether the differences between young vs established firms make certain characteristics of young CEOs beneficial to young firms.