This paper offers an insight into the optimality of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and its common monetary policies by evaluating the degree of business cycle synchronisation among the EMU member states with respect to the Eurozone aggregate. Business cycles for each country,...

Mit rund 1,2 Mill. Beschäftigten (1987) und einem Umsatz von 950 Mrd. DM (1990) stellen die fast 115.000 Unternehmen des Großhandels einen wichtigen Wirtschaftsfaktor dar. Nach den Berechnungen des ifo-Instituts war der deutsche Großhandel 1988 zu 41% in den gesamten Inlandsabsatz...

In einer Befragung bei Unternehmen der Textilindustrie wurde ermittelt, welche Bedeutung das Kopieren von Produktentwürfen hat, und wie sich die Unternehmen wehren. Ein Problem ist, daß Nachahmungen für betroffene Unternehmen mit designorientierten, innovativen Produkten ein Ärgernis sind,...

Using a comprehensive data set of Portuguese manufacturing firms, we show that the firm size distribution is significantly right-skewed, evolving over time toward a log-normal distribution. We also show that selection accounts for very little of this evolution. Instead, we propose a simple...

This paper presents a dynamic model of the firm size distribution. Empirical studies of the firm size distribution often compare the moments to a log-normal distribution as implied by Gibrat's Law and note important deviations. Thus, the first, and basic questions we ask are how well does the...

Over the last 20 years, the annual average U.S. and Canadian productivity growth rates have been 2.3% and 1.3%, respectively. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we empirically document the firm size distribution and the productivity for the two countries. Second, we quantitatively...

It has recently been shown that the firm size distribution is initially skewed to the right and then evolves over time to become more lognormal, and argued that this is likely due to firms initially facing financial constraints, see Cabral and Mata(2003). We conjecture that, if this is true,...

This paper analyzes the effects of intrafirm bargaining on the formation of firms in an economy with imperfect capital markets and contracting constraints. In equilibrium wealth inequality induces a heterogenous distribution of firm sizes allowing for firms both too small and too large in terms...

This paper presents a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms and entrepreneur's portfolio choice. We analytically show that this model generates the Pareto distribution of top income earners and Zipf's law of firms at the steady state. The differential equation for the...