What Makes A High-Growth Firm? A Probit Analysis Using Spanish Firm-level Data

Many studies have established that a small number of firms, known as fast-growth firms or Gazelles, create most of the new jobs. In spite of the importance of this topic from a policy-point of view, most of those studies are descriptive and limited to a comparison of the characteristics of the high-growth group with respect to a control group of firms. This paper, on the other hand, performs a multivariate analysis of the determinants of the fast growth of Spanish firms controlling for the possible endogeneity of some variables. The authors use for that purpose a firm-level database with information for about 200,000 Spanish firms per year between 1996 and 2003.