Growth persistence and profile robustness of high-growth firms

Abstract

This paper analyses the persistence of high business growth and the robustness of the profile characteristics of high-growth firms (HGFs). By having company information for all firms that are active in Flanders (i.e., the northern part of Belgium) for a ten-year period (i.e., from 2000 to 2009), different subsets of HGFs were identified for different time periods. Several questions arise, such as whether the firms that were qualified as an HGF in a certain period were able to maintain the high growth rates for multiple (consecutive) periods and whether the profile characteristics of the HGF-subsets are stable over time. It appeared that the majority of the firms that were identified as an HGF in the period 2000–2009 were ‘one-shot HGFs’. Notwithstanding the rapidly changing composition of the subsets, the profile features of the HGFs in the subset remained relatively constant over time.