"High and Sustainable Growth: Persistence, Volatility, and Survival in High Growth Firms"

In most developed countries, high growth firms (HGFs) are disproportionately responsible for net job creation, yet there is little information about how well these firms sustain their performance over time. Using panel data of 79,200 Romanian firms from 2000-2012, this paper evaluates the extent to which high growth firms produce stable and sustained growth over time, using multiple variations of high growth definitions. The results indicate that HGFs are unable to maintain the high growth rates, but do have attractive growth profiles, with lower growth volatility and higher survival. The magnitude of the results varies with the definition (e.g., Birch, OECD, Top 5%), indicator (e.g., revenue, employees, profit, productivity), and measure (e.g., absolute, relative, index). The best performing cohorts of HGFs are selected with absolute values of revenue or employees, while the relative measures and the productivity indicator lead to results undistinguishable from non-HGFs. From a policy perspective, the re...