Join us for this weeks Macroeconomics Research Seminar, Autumn Term 2021.
Professor Vincent Sterk from the Department of Economics at UCL will present their research on Startup Types, Structural Policy and Macroeconomic Performance in Europe
Abstract
How much can policymakers improve macroeconomic outcomes by encouraging the entry of high-performance startups? We construct a novel and comprehensive data set on almost 1,5 million startup firms in ten European countries and apply cluster analysis to identify distinct startup types and trace their development through early life. Three new stylized facts about entrepreneurial startup strategies transpire. First, we uncover five well-separated clusters of startups, which we label Basic, Large, Capital intensive, Cash intensive, and High leverage. Second, these five startup types are consistently present across countries, industries, and cohorts. Third, startup types are associated with specific life-cycle performance in terms of productivity, employment generation, and exit rates. Feeding these empirical results into an agnostic firm dynamics model, we quantify how much structural policy could improve macroeconomic performance by shifting the composition of startups towards high-performance types. We find that substantial gains in aggregate employment and productivity may be reaped through policies that benefit high-performance startups (such as large and capital intensive types) while discouraging the entry of underperforming startups (such as high-leverage ones).
This seminar will be held at 4pm on Wednesday 8th December at the Colchester Campus in CTC 1.01. This event is open to all levels of study and is also open to the public, but will also be held on Zoom.
To register your place, please contact the seminar organisers.
This event is part of the Macroeconomics Research Seminar Series.