Data-driven definitions of gazelle companies that rule out chance: application for Russia and Spain

Abstract

The phenomenon of fast-growing companies exhibiting sustained growth and creating disproportionally many new jobs, so-called “gazelles”, has been widely analyzed in the literature. The criteria defining “gazelles”, however, lack a consensus, while it cannot be ruled out that superior performance of these companies is just good luck. We use large firm-level datasets for Russia and Spain and conduct a Monte Carlo experiment with first-order Markov chains to derive a definition of “gazelle” companies and ensure that their existence cannot be explained by chance only.