CEU eTD Collection (2017); Pázmándi, Eszter: Do Founders Matter? -Leadership Structure and New Firm Performance

CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
Author Pázmándi, Eszter
Title Do Founders Matter? -Leadership Structure and New Firm Performance
Summary The overall objective of the thesis is to find enough evidence on the existence of causal relationship between leadership change in newly-founded enterprises and their performance. The used sample consists 13 516 Hungarian startups incorporated between 2005 and 2007. I test the effect of having the founder as CEO and examine the consequences of replacing the founder-CEO on different performance measures and survival prospects of firms. I carry out Difference-in-Difference regressions to see whether the shift to professional management has caused any change in the performance of firms after the transition. Short-and long-term survival chances of the startups are analyzed with linear probability models. I find that there are significant differences in performance measures and in long-term survival prospects among the examined startups, according to their leadership style. Corporations which went through a founder-CEO replacement show a positive and remarkable improvement both in their performances and survival probabilities. Despite that my results are statistically significant, I can not claim that there is an exclusive causal relationship between the replacement of founder-CEOs and performance improvement of startups, neither can exclude the possibility of a reverse causality.
Supervisor Békés, Gábor
Department Economics MA
Full texthttps://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/pazmandi_eszter.pdf

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