We focus on the relationship of age and diversification patterns of German machine tool manufacturers in the post war era. Based on trade journals we track the entire firm populations' product portfolio development throughout each firm's lifetime. We distinguish between "minor diversification"...

We focus on the relationship between age and diversification patterns of German machine tool manufacturers in the post-war era. We distinguish between ‘minor diversification’ (adding a new product variation within a familiar submarket) and ‘major diversification’ (expanding the product...

Investigating the role of diversification in the firm growth process, we build on Penrose’s (The theory of the growth of the firm. Oxford University Press, Oxford, <CitationRef CitationID="CR30">1959</CitationRef>) Theory of the Growth of the Firm to formulate hypotheses about growth of employment, assets and sales in the years before,...</citationref>

Inter-firm competition has received much attention in the theoretical literature, but recent empirical work suggests that the growth rates of rival firms are uncorrelated, and that firm growth can be taken as an essentially independent process. We begin by investigating the correlations of the...

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...

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. -- Firm size distribution ; firm growth ; Gibrat's...