Authors: Michael Schwartz
Publish Date: 2012/04/06
Volume: 38, Issue: 3, Pages: 302-331
Abstract
It is widely unclear as to whether startup firms supported by publiclyinitiated incubator initiatives have higher survival rates than comparable startup firms that have not received support by such initiatives This paper contributes to the underlying discussion by performing a largescale matchedpairs analysis of the longterm survival of 371 incubator firms after their graduation from five German incubators and a control group of 371 comparable nonincubated firms The analysis covers a 10year time span To account for the problem of selection bias a nonparametric matching approach is applied to identify an appropriate control group For neither of the five incubator locations we find statistically significant higher survival probabilities for firms located in incubators compared to firms located outside those incubator organizations For three incubator locations the analysis reveals statistically significant lower chances of survival for those startups receiving support by an incubator The empirical results therefore raise some doubts regarding the impacts of incubation on longterm firm survival
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