There can be several reasons for these findings, for example selection into certain industries, abilities of the companies to grow, etc. In this report we use regression analysis to check for underlying causes for such lower performance.
Our sample is picked among "closely owned" limited companies, i.e. companies where there is one or more large owners who can be expected to have control or influence on operations and choice of strategy. In our context, this is a natural choice, but implies that some enterprises (with broad ownership) are not included in the analysis.
We find that even if one controls for background variables that affect characteristics of the enterprises, the differences remain, albeit to a lesser extent. The single factor that has the greatest importance, in the sense that the differences become smaller when we include it as an explanatory variable, is the age of the enterprises. This can only be partly explained by the fact that immigrant enterprises are not among the very oldest enterprises. The main explanation is that among the well-established enterprises (which are often larger than newly established ones), immigrant enterprises are smaller than other enterprises, on average.
We also examine in detail the characteristics of the respective distributions by size and find that the differences we can observe in figures for average size are driven by differences at the very top of the distributions, where immigrant enterprises are underrepresented.
Finally, we use factor analysis to identify "success factors" for businesses where owners have an immigrant background. One of the findings here is that enterprises with mixed ownership (immigrants and others, often also with women among large owners) are more likely to end up among the 10 per cent largest enterprises.