High growth as a double-edged sword: Burden of expectations, strategic choices, and the long-run performance

This dissertation examines what happens after firms achieve high growth. High-growth firms are often portrayed as engines of innovation and job creation, yet most research emphasizes how firms reach rapid expansion and implicitly treats high growth as enduring success. In this dissertation, I shift attention to the post-growth phase and argue that high growth is also a history that shapes stakeholder expectations and, in turn, subsequent evaluation and performance in public markets.
Exceptional growth can signal superior resources, dynamic capabilities, and scalable business models. It can also reflect a temporary surge that strains managerial systems, increases coordination and governance costs, and makes normal deceleration appear as a decline. A high growth reputation is therefore double-edged. It attracts attention and capital and supports favorable narratives, while simultaneously raising performance benchmarks and intensifying scrutiny. When growth normalizes, this burden of expectation can trigger disproportionate penalties even when fundamentals remain sound.
The dissertation advances the central claim that long-run outcomes depend not on growth alone but on expectation formation and revision, and on how high-growth firms manage their trajectories. Chapter Two shows that high-growth IPO firms underperform comparable non high-growth IPO firms on average, but that post-IPO acquisition and scaling actions can partially mitigate the downside. Chapter Three shows that the balance between sales growth and profitability growth drives performance, contingent on IPO size, digitalization, and environmental uncertainty. Chapter Four shows that IPO prospectus framing shapes investor attributions and influences long-term market performance. Overall, the dissertation integrates strategic and behavioral perspectives to explain why sustaining value after high-growth requires managing both growth quality and market expectations.