We examine the physical health consequences to entrepreneurs of firm growth and decline. Drawing on the Challenge Hindrance Stressor Framework and the Allostatic Load model and using register-based panel data (2000-2021), we study (1) whether entrepreneurs are more likely to experience serious, stress-related diseases and premature mortality compared to hired CEOs and a socio-economically similar random sample from the general population, and (2) whether prolonged or episodic exposure to growth or decline (in sales/employees) increases entrepreneurs’ likelihood of serious, stress-related disease onset and premature mortality compared to hired CEOs. Due to the sensitive nature of the individual data, all the authorities who granted the research permits have very strict conditions regarding the data. Therefore, access to these data is restricted and requires contact with the relevant authorities, a security clearance process and data secure processing of the data. While we are legally prohibited from sharing data, we provide the annotated code that an authorized user of these of these data may use to construct our variables and run the analyses in the OSF archive. Thus, researchers can independently obtain access to the data for replication purposes with the permission of the relevant authorities and replicate the analysis steps using the data descriptions and the code we provide. This will hopefully facilitate the replication efforts with the Finnish data and extension efforts in different countries. Related materials: article and supplementary material (including list of data sources)

2024