This paper presents a multidimensional empirical analysis of firm growth. Exploiting census data on Italian manufacturing firms, 1989-1997, we estimate a reduced-form VAR to analyze the co-evolution of employment growth, sales growth, growth of profits and labour productivity growth. Our main...

We relate innovation to sales growth for incumbent firms in high-tech sectors. A firm, on average, experiences only modest growth and may grow for a number of reasons that may or may not be related to innovativeness. However, given that the returns to innovation are highly skewed and that growth...

Theoretical and empirical studies of industry dynamics have extensively focused on the process of growth. Theory predicts that production efficiency, profitability and financial status are central channels through which some firms can survive, grow and eventually achieve outstanding growth...

Combining detailed data on export transactions and an informative firm level measure of financing constraints, this paper provides new evidence on the extent and dynamics of product and geographical diversification of constrained exporters. Financial constraints associates with: (i) narrower...

The paper examines the causal effect of financial constraints on firm exports. We exploit a firm-level proxy of constraints based on credit ratings and available for a large panel of Italian exporting and non exporting firms. Our estimation strategy allows to cure for self-selection into exports...

Analyzing a large sample of Italian firms we find that the probability of default increases with size. This contrasts with the common observation, based on measures of exit from business registry data, that firms' death rate is inversely related to the scale of their operation and suggests a...

The upper tail of the firm size distribution is often assumed to follows a Power Law behavior. Recently, using different estimators and on different data sets, several papers conclude that this distribution follows the Zipf Law, that is that the fraction of firms whose size is above a given...

This paper presents a broad set of empirical regularities about selection and market shares reallocation in manufacturing industries of France, Germany, UK and USA. We first disentangle the contribution to industry-level productivity growth of within-firm productivity changes and between-firms...

Diverse theories of industry dynamics predict heterogeneity in production efficiency to be the driver of firms' growth, survival and industrial change, either through a direct link between efficiency and growth, or through an indirect effect via profitabilities, as more productive firms can...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the role that financial constraints play in shaping firms' export activities. We use custom information on cross borders transactions for Italian firms, together with an informative measure of financing constraints based on an official credit...