Little is known about how firm performance changes with age, presumably because of the paucity of data on firm age. We analyze the performance of a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms between 1998 and 2006, relating it to firm age. We find evidence that firms improve with age, because ageing...

In this short research note we investigate the role of diversification in the firm growth process. We build on Penrose’s (1959) Theory of the Growth of the Firm to formulate hypotheses about growth of employment, assets, and sales in the years before, during and after a new product...

This paper offers new insights into the processes of firm growth by applying a reducedform vector autoregression (VAR) model to longitudinal panel data on French manufacturing firms. We observe the co-evolution of key variables such as growth of employment, sales, and gross operating surplus, as...

While Gibrat's Law assumes that growth rate variance is independent of size, empirical work has usually found a negative relationship between growth rate variance and firm growth. Using data on French manufacturing firms, we observe a relatively low, but statistically significant, negative...

We apply a reduced-form vector autoregression model to analyze the growth processes of Italian manufacturing firms, 1989-1997. We focus in particular on lead-lag associations describing the coevolution of employment growth, sales growth, growth of profits and labour productivity growth....

Recent work drawing on data for large and small firms has shown a Pareto distribution of firm size. We mix a Gibrat-type growth process among incumbents with an exponential distribution of firm's age, to obtain the empirical Pareto distribution.

While several plots of the aggregate age distribution suggest that firm age is exponentially distributed, we find some departures from the exponential benchmark. At the lower tail, we find that very young establishments are more numerous than expected, but they face high exit hazards. At the...

While several plots of the aggregate age distribution suggest that firm age is exponentially distributed, we find some departures from the exponential benchmark. At the lower tail, we find that very young establishments are more numerous than expected, but they face high exit hazards. At the...

While several plots of the aggregate age distribution suggest that firm age is exponentially distributed, we find some departures from the exponential benchmark. At the lower tail, we find that very young establishments are more numerous than expected, but they face high exit hazards. At the...

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...