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...

The study of firms' default has attracted wide interest among both practitioners and scholars. However, attention has often been limited to a relatively small set of financial variables. In this work, we try to increase the scope of analysis extending the investigation to other possible...

This work explores a number of properties investigated in the empirical literature on firm size and growth dynamics: (i) the distribution and the autoregressive structure of firm size; (ii) the existence of size-growth scaling relationships; (iii) the distribution and the autoregressive structure...

We study the relationships between firm financial structure and growth for a large sample of Italian firms (1998-2003). We expand upon existing analyses testing whether liquidity constraints affect firm performance by considering among growth determinants also firm debt structure. Panel...

This study analyses persistence in growth rates of the entire population of Dutch manufacturing firms. Previous literature on firm growth rates shows that extreme growth events are likely to be negatively correlated over time. A rebound effect following an extreme growth event questions the...

This paper investigates the relevance of financial and economic variables as determinants of firm defaults. Our analysis is not limited to publicly traded companies but extends to a large sample of limited liability firms. We consider size, growth, profitability and productivity together with a...

The economic theory of intellectual property rights is based on a rather narrow view of both competition and technological knowledge. We suggest some ways of enriching this framework with a more empirically grounded view of both and, by means of a simulation model, we analyze the impact of...

This work investigates how the export status of the firm influences the patterns of growth at different age classes. We address this research question resorting to a novel set of data that links together the universe of Italian firms and detailed data on export transactions. We find that the...

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 studies the impact of size on labor cost and productivity for Italian manufacturing firms. The distributions of both labor cost and productivity display a wide support, even when disaggregated by sector of industrial activity. Further, both labor cost and productivity, when considered...