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.
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Notes
The strategy of mainstreaming is defined in the agreed conclusions of the Economic and Social Council, 1997/2, as “… the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality” (United Nations 1999, p.23).
Employment guidelines are common priorities and targets for employment policies proposed by the Commission, agreed by national governments and adopted by the EU Council.
“Knowledge-based capital comprises a variety of assets. These assets create future benefits for firms but, unlike machines, equipment, vehicles and structures, they are not physical. This non-tangible form of capital is, increasingly, the largest form of business investment and a key contributor to growth in advanced economies” (OECD 2013, p.12).
See Link and Strong (2016) for a more in-depth review of this body of literature.
An alternative specification of the founders’ gender could be defined in terms of strict majority in the gender of the founders. Our results are robust to this alternative specification of gender and available upon request.
The first stage comprises of two regression equations, one for each endogenous variable: the innovative share of turnover and the sales growth from non-innovative products. We report only the first-stage results of the innovative turnover regressions.
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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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In Greek mythology the aegis was a shield carried by Athena and Zeus. It is also the acronym of the project under which the data used in this paper were collected (AEGIS - Advancing knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship and innovation for growth and social well-being in Europe). The modern concept of doing something “under someone’s aegis” means doing something under the protection of a powerful, knowledgeable, or benevolent source.
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Amoroso, S., Link, A.N. Under the AEGIS of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship: employment growth and gender of founders among European firms. Small Bus Econ 50, 899–915 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-017-9920-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-017-9920-4