The immediate survival of the Italian start-up businesses in healthcare industry: a multilevel analysis

Journal title RIVISTA DI ECONOMIA E STATISTICA DEL TERRITORIO
Author/s Marco Bee, Maria Michela Dickson, Diego Giuliani, Davide Piacentino, Flavio Santi, Emanuele Taufer
Publishing Year 2017 Issue 2016/3 Language Italian
Pages 11 P. 49-59 File size 197 KB
DOI 10.3280/REST2016-003004
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The purpose of this contribution is to provide novel evidence about the main determinants of the short-run survival of pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing start-up firms in Italy. In order to assess both the firm-specific determinants and the observed and unobserved regional and contextual characteristics, we model the three-year firm survival probability by means of a multilevel logistic framework.
Methods and Results
The empirical analysis focuses on an internationally comparable database of the population of firms built up and managed by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), in accordance with the procedures suggested by OECD and EUROSTAT, which guarantee that data are not affected by the typical inconsistencies of the National Business Registers and hence provide the true information about firm entries and exits. The size of this dataset and the high number of regional random effects, however, makes the standard estimation techniques of the multilevel logistic model computationally unfeasible. The estimation is then performed by means of the cross-entropy method for noisy optimization (Bee et al., 2015).
Conclusion
The estimates show that the main determinants of short-run survival probability of pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing start-up firms are the labour productivity and the labour costs, whilst the legal form of the firm, the number of employees and the GDP growth rate are not statistically significant.

Keywords: Firm demography, firm survival, multilevel logistic modelling, cross-entropy method, start-up firms

Jel codes: C25; C51; D22

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Marco Bee, Maria Michela Dickson, Diego Giuliani, Davide Piacentino, Flavio Santi, Emanuele Taufer, La sopravvivenza immediata delle start-up italiane del settore manifatturiero sanitario: un’analisi multilevel in "RIVISTA DI ECONOMIA E STATISTICA DEL TERRITORIO" 3/2016, pp 49-59, DOI: 10.3280/REST2016-003004