Does gender matter for innovative and non-innovative firms’ growth? An empirical analysis of Chilean managers

ABSTRACT

Firm growth has been a focus of attention for a large number of studies. However, the influence of a firm’s manager is still absent from many of these analyses. Departing from the data of the Longitudinal Survey of Businesses from Chile, the aim of this article is to analyse the relationship between innovation and firm growth depending on the sex of the leader between 2007 and 2015. Applying econometric models of quantiles with fixed effects, the results reveal that there is a positive relationship between innovation, firms led by women and sales growth. In particular, male managers exert a negative impact on the firm growth. This impact is particularly more important for non-innovative firms. Finally, the growth rate increases if a female manager replaces to a male manager. Conversely, the growth rate decreases if a male manager replaces a female manager.

KEYWORDS:

• Firm growth
• innovation
• gender
• Chile
• manager

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of the investigations carried out with the financial support of the Consolidated Research Group 2014–SGR–1395 of the Catalan Government, the Xarxa de Referència d’Economia Aplicada (XREAP), and the competitive project ECO2015-68061-R ‘Gender Diversity as a Determinant of Innovation: An Analysis of the Impact of Gender Diversity on Firm Innovation’ funded by the Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness Spanish Government and by European funds from FEDER. We are particularly grateful to the two anonymous referees that provide very useful suggestions and comments. We are grateful to Verònica Gombau for her research support. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 During the revision process, one of our referees suggested us this analysis. We thank her/him for the idea.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is part of the investigations carried out with the financial support of the competitive project ECO2015-68061-R ‘Gender Diversity as a Determinant of Innovation: An Analysis of the Impact of Gender Diversity on Firm Innovation’ funded by the Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness of Spanish Government and by European funds from FEDER.