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...

This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of different business strategies is conditional on the firm's distance to the industry frontier. We use data on four 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the US over the period 1972-1999, and apply...

Serial correlation in annual growth rates carries a lot of information on growth processes it allows us to directly observe firm performance as well as to test theories. Using a 7-year balanced panel of 10 000 French manufacturing firms, we observe that small firms typically are subject to...

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...

This work explores basic properties of the size and growth rates distributions of firms at the aggregate and disaggregate levels. Using an extensive dataset on French manufacturing firms, we investigate which properties of firm size distributions and growth dynamics characterize the aggregate...