Effects of Human Capital on the Growth and Survival of Swedish Businesses

This paper examines the effects of human capital on the growth and survival of a large sample of Swedish businesses. Human capital is represented by conventional measures of the educational attainment and experience of an establishment’s workers and skills-based measures of the types of occupations present in the company. Controlling for an establishment’s size and age, as well as its industry and region of location, we find that the human capital embodied in a company’s workers affects its performance. The specific effects, however, depend on how human capital is measured and whether the analysis focuses on growth or survival.