In this paper we test both sunk cost and strategic size liability predictions by looking at the exit behavior of a sample of Italian manufacturing plants. For this purpose, we focus on plants' size and ownership status. In particular, we distinguish independent plants from plants that belong to...

Advanced market economies are characterized by a continuous process of creative destruction. Market forces and technological developments play a major role in shaping this process, but institutional and policy settings also influence firms’ decision to enter, to expand if successful and to...

Advanced market economies are characterized by a continuous process of creative destruction. Market forces and technological developments play a major role in shaping this process, but institutional and policy settings also influence firms' decision to enter, to expand if successful and to exit...

We introduce a taxonomy that classifies industries using three criteria: net growth in thenumber of firms; the interrelationship between firm entry and firm exit; and the degree of urbanbiasin industry growth. We show that in 9 of 15 two-digit NAICS industries investigated, thereis evidence of...

This paper uses the pattern of firm entry and exit to develop a classification system forindustries. The classifications include urbanruralbias; longtermgrowth; and firm survivalpatterns. The first captures the fact that sectorspecificeconomic growth may be favored inurban areas for some...

We show that, in a large class of models, market frictions lead to predictable dynamic patterns of the acquisition and subsequent shedding of inputs by firms. The logic is as follows. During high demand and expansionary periods, firms that fail to have inputs (machinery, labor, space, credit) in...

In this paper we provide an analysis of the process of creative destruction across 24 countries and 2-digit industries over the past decade. We rely on a newly assembled dataset that draws from different micro data sources (business registers, census, or representative enterprise surveys). The...

Measuring the extent to which a firm is financially constrained is critical in assessing capital structure. Extant measures of financial constraints focus on macro firm characteristics such as age and size – variables highly correlated with other firm attributes. We parse 10-K disclosures...

The paper investigates whether liquidity constraints affect firm size and growth dynamics using a large longitudinal sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We run standard panel-data Gibrat regressions, suitably expanded to take into account liquidity constraints (proxied by cash flow scaled by...

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...