We study the duration distribution of recessions and recoveries occurred in a pool of industrialized countries during the last 120 years. We find that for recessions the duration is distributed according to a power law, and that the power exponent is virtually invariant as we split up the time...

We analyze the average size distribution of a pool of the G7 group's firms over the period 1987–2000. In particular, firm sizes are measured employing different proxies, and after conditioning on business cycle phases. We find that: (i) the empirical distributions are all consistent with a...