The Age Effect In Entrepreneurship: Founder's Tenure, Firm Performance, And The Economic Environment

This paper tests the effect of founder's tenure on firm performance by taking into account the impact of the changes occurring in the economic environment. The authors use a large dataset of founder-run firms that includes, in addition to financial data, company data directly collected through a survey of about 2,000 Italian firms. Unlike the negative relationship reported in most empirical papers, they found an inverted U-shaped relationship between founder-CEO tenure and firm performance.