Meehan, LisaZheng, Guanyu2025-03-262025-03-262015New Zealand Productivity Commission Working Paper 2015/1. Te Kōmihana o Whai Hua o Aotearoa. ISBN: 978-0-478-44015-7 (online only)http://hdl.handle.net/10292/18960This paper uses a cohort approach to examine firm dynamics and employment growth in New Zealand. Consistent with overseas evidence, we find a large degree of churn in the economy, with many new, mostly small, firms being created each year. Many of these firms disappear relatively quickly, but those that manage to survive experience reasonable employment growth on average. However, much of this “on average” growth is driven by a very small number of firms with high employment growth. Indeed, we find that while the smallest firms play a relatively large role in accounting for net job creation, this growth involves just a modest proportion of the smallest firms, while the majority of these firms do not grow much at all.© Crown Copyright, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). This Crown copyright material is licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. In essence, you are free to copy, distribute and adapt the material, as long as you attribute it to the Treasury and abide by the other licence terms.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Working paperOpenAccess