Productivity and Entrepreneurial Characteristics in New Japanese Firms.

This article estimated the production function of new Japanese firms using cross-sectional data from the "Survey on Business Startups in Japan" in 1998, and investigated whether the total factor productivity of new firms is affected by the human capital and gender of entrepreneurs. Empirical results show decreasing returns to scale of production, which verifies the assumption of production functions in many previous studies on entrepreneur ship. Further, it is shown that the entrepreneur' s age has a significantly negative effect on productivity, and the negative effect increases after 60 years of age.