Cultural and creative entrepreneurs in financial crises: Sailing against the tide?

We focus on a number of idiosyncrasies of cultural and creative entrepreneurs (CCEs) to study CCEs’ capacity of resilience under times of downturn (economic, financial and debt crisis). We analyse CC firms’ demography (born and dead), trends and performance and the association between subsidies received and firm survival. We look at mostly micro firms in a country where CCEs are particularly challenged from the financial perspective, namely Portugal. We exploit the unique availability of accounting micro data at private firm level in a time span of 8 years (2004-2011), which allows to include the effects of the latest financial crisis, and to understand the evolution of the economic success criterion. The obtained results about the impact of subsidies on survival are interesting in both CCEs and policy perspectives, suggesting a positive impact of subsidies in periods of downturn, and negative impact of subsidies in periods of growth of the economy. Further, CC firms revealed to be more dynamic than other firms in other sectors.