Personal Experience: A Most Vicious and Limited Circle!?
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number of firm closures, and have been analyzed separately. There are two fail-
ure types, which can be identified: bankruptcy and the voluntary closure of a
firm in financial distress. The results of the analysis indicate that experiences of
success have no favorable effects when it comes to the probability of failure,
apart from partly lowering the bankruptcy risk for a restart. Conversely, negative
experience, namely previous entrepreneurial failure, raises the risk of failing
again. This means that the derived hypotheses - experience initiates learning and
thus more success - are mainly rejected. In particular, the assumption that ex-
perience of failure induces higher-level learning is dismissed. Indeed, the oppo-
site seems to be the case: failure experience increases the risk of further failure.