Best Selling Books by David Storey

The Phoenix Theatre is going dark-indeed, being demolished for more profitable purposes. Its artistic director is determined to stay for the bitter end, and as he holes up for the last twenty-four hours, all the ghosts of his murky career parade before him. Not only the theatre, but he too, is due for demolition. By one of our major writers, this play is about the survival of theatre: physically, emotionally and culturally.

Several theories suggest that excessive fast growth may lead to failure. We explore survival across the growth rate distribution for a cohort of 6579 new ventures, tracked over their first 10 years, using customer records data from a major UK bank. We measure failure though termination of the business account (as opposed to either continuation or switching the account to a rival bank), or through entry into financial default. Unconditional bar charts show that it is the 7th or 8th decile of the growth distribution that has the highest survival chances. Although growth enhances survival on average, the highest decile of the growth distribution never has the highest survival, and there are significant non-linearities beyond the quadratic case (specification tests prefer higher-order polynomials). Our findings have implications for the current policy interest in high-growth firms.