Abstract

Newly founded firms play an important role for the renewal of the economic basis. They foster economic structural change and play a prominent role for facilitating innovations. But this does not hold for all new firms in equal measure. Most newly founded firms are only innovative on a small scale that often consists merely in filling a market niche that has not yet been exploited or that someone else has vacated. But beside these, there exists a rather small group of high-tech start-ups that are expected to have considerable influence in the economic performance of regions or even nations. These firms are supposed to develop and disseminate new technologies and create high quality jobs. But especially about the latter little is known so far, not least because of the lacking of appropriate data on jobs in newly founded businesses. This project tries to overcome this insufficiency by creating a linked employer-employee dataset on newly founded firms. Interviews conducted for the KfW-ZEW Start-Up Panel (https://www.gruendungspanel.de/en/kfwzew-gruendungspanel/home.html)on new high-tech firms in Germany. These interviews were matched with individual data on employees from the IAB, thus providing a linked dataset which comprises data from a comprehensive start-up survey as well as personal data generated in labour administration and social security data. Because a common identifier is lacking, the matching was made via firm addresses (record linkage).
 

Research until 2015 will concentrate on a co-operation between the IAB, the ZEW, the Brunel University London and the "Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research" (Lisbon), for which external funds where granted from the "Strengthening Efficiency and Competitiveness in the European Knowledge Economies (SEEK)" program. This project is about how human capital builts up in newly founded high-tech establishments. In the early start-up phase human capital can be equalised with those of the founders. During later growth-phases the human capital of the employees becomes more and more important. To analyse these interactions and its implications on the development of the new firms a linked employer-employee dataset is needed. The joint analysis of Portugese and German data allows it to study how a crisis impacts the built-up of the two componets of human capital in newly founded high-tech firms.