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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter September 26, 2018

Firms’ Proactiveness During the Crisis: Evidence from European Data

  • Jan Brzozowski ORCID logo EMAIL logo , Marco Cucculelli ORCID logo and Valentina Peruzzi ORCID logo

Abstract

This paper contributes to the literature on the entrepreneurial behavior of firms during the economic crisis, by investigating the determinants of proactive behavior on a large sample of European companies during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. We explore various dimensions of proactive behavior, including: investments in innovation, expanding product offer, undergoing quality certification, investing in tangible assets and avoiding layoff. Our findings show a surprising heterogeneity of determinants in the case of different proactivity measures, especially when considering the impact of public policies which support entrepreneurship. We also provide some evidence supporting the organizational learning hypothesis with regard to proactiveness, as we show that the previous crisis experience matters in the case of the adoption of proactive or reactive strategy by a firm.

JEL Classification: C51; D81; L26

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (DOI:https://doi.org/10.1515/erj-2017-0215).


Published Online: 2018-09-26

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