Small Business Economics

, Volume 50, Issue 4, pp 899–915 | Cite as

Under the AEGIS of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship: employment growth and gender of founders among European firms

Article
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Abstract

An increasing number of theoretical and empirical analyses address the role of innovation as one of the main sources of firm growth. More recently, studies have looked at the role of gender diversity as a possible determinant of innovation and entrepreneurial performance. However, the relationship between gender and employment growth—a dimension of entrepreneurial performance—still remains unexplored to a large degree. This paper contributes to the empirical literature on gender and entrepreneurial performance in several ways. First, it examines the role played by both innovation and gender ownership as determinants of employment growth rates of young, knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial (KIE) firms. Second, it investigates the indirect impact of contributing factors—such as the characteristics of the market, knowledge-based capital, and human capital—on employment growth. And third, it relies on a rich new cross-sectional data set on young, KIE firms across European Union (EU) countries. The data set contains information not only on the gender of the firm’s founders but also on the market environment, business strategy, and innovative and economic performance of firms.

Keywords

Innovation Entrepreneurship Employment growth Gender 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the AEGIS consortium for providing data of the AEGIS survey which supported the empirical investigation of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship in Europe in different sectoral, country, and socioeconomic contexts. This survey was conducted in the context of the AEGIS research project (Advancing Knowledge-Intensive Entrepreneurship and Innovation for Economic Growth and Social Well-being in Europe) co-funded by the European Commission under Theme 8 “Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities” of the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Joint Research Centre (JRC) - European CommissionSevilleSpain
  2. 2.University of North Carolina at GreensboroGreensboroUSA

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