RESUMEN
This work contributes to disaster research by exploring the impact on new firm creation of the COVID-19 pandemic and the pandemic-related policies. We develop hypotheses on the individual and combined effects of pandemic severity and public policies aimed at controlling the spread of the disease (shutdown policies) or protecting the economy from its negative consequences (demand stimulus and firm support policies). Then, we test these hypotheses using data on Italy in the first and second 2020 pandemic waves. Results show that pandemic severity negatively affected new firm creation during the first wave. Shutdown policies had negative effects too, especially in the regions where the pandemic was less severe. The effects of demand stimulus policies were positive and stronger the less severe the pandemic was while the impact of firm support policies was negative in the regions where the pandemic was more severe. All these effects vanished in the second wave.
RESUMEN
This paper contributes to studies on dynamic capabilities (DCs) by showing that a neglected environmental contingency - i.e. the occurrence of a jolt - shapes the DCs-performance relationship. We focus on high-tech entrepreneurial ventures because these are the firms that jolts affect most; in so doing, we also advance the understanding of DCs in the entrepreneurship field. We argue that, in the aftermath of an environmental jolt, the high-tech entrepreneurial ventures that use internationalization and new product development capabilities to modify their resource configuration and regain environmental fit enjoy better performance. Econometric estimates on a sample of 340 Italian high-tech entrepreneurial ventures confronting the consequences of the global economic crisis that began in 2008 confirm that separately using these two DCs has a positive performance effect. This effect is stronger for relatively smaller ventures. Interestingly, despite synergies should arise from the combined use of the two DCs, we do not detect any superadditive effects.