Whether firms founded during or outside economic crises have greater growth potential is an important question for both prospective entrepreneurs and policy makers. Existing research offers conflicting answers, and mostly either focuses on aggregate cohort-level effects or selectively excludes small new firms from the analyses. Using extensive linked employer-employee data on young German firms around and during the Global Financial Crisis, a period of sharply reduced access to external capital and recession, we show that young firms respond to cyclical conditions in highly heterogeneous ways. Our firm-level results reveal that the average new firm found it easier to hire its first employees when it was founded during the crisis. These firms achieved countercyclical growth by hiring career entrants. More specifically, hiring in very young (<1.5 years) and small to medium-sized (below the 90th percentile) young firms was countercyclical, while this was not the case for older and larger young firms. Thus, the firm-specific effects for young entrepreneurial firms may be very different from those reported in previous research. Our results suggest that market entry during a crisis may facilitate hiring and that policies that promote entrepreneurship may usefully complement policies that encourage labor hoarding by incumbents during recessions.

在经济危机期间或之外成立的公司是否具有更大的增长潜力，是潜在企业家和政策制定者都面临的一个重要问题。现有的研究提供了相互矛盾的答案，并且大多关注总体队列水平的影响，或者选择性地将小型新公司排除在分析之外。利用全球金融危机前后和期间德国年轻企业的大量关联雇主-雇员数据，我们发现年轻企业以高度异质的方式应对周期性条件。我们的公司层面的调查结果显示，新公司在危机期间成立时，平均更容易招聘到第一批员工。这些公司通过招聘职业进入者实现了逆周期增长。更具体地说，非常年轻（x3C1.5 岁）和中小型（低于 90 个百分位）年轻公司的招聘是反周期的，而老牌和大型年轻公司的招聘情况则不是这样。因此，公司对年轻创业公司的影响可能与之前研究中报告的影响大不相同。我们的结果表明，危机期间的市场进入可能会促进招聘，而促进创业的政策可能会有效地补充在职企业在经济衰退期间囤积劳动力的政策。