Theoretical and empirical studies of industry dynamics have extensively focused on the process of growth. Theory predicts that production efficiency, profitability and financial status are central channels through which some firms can survive, grow and eventually achieve outstanding growth...

Analyzing a comprehensive database of limited liability manufacturing firms this paper investigates the relation between a firm's financial situation and its conditional expected growth rate. Specifically, using quantile regressions, we obtain a quantitative characterization of this relation for...

We present a simple agent based model aimed at the qualitative description of trading activity in a stylized financial market. A two assets economy is considered, with a bond providing a riskless constant return and a risky stock, paying constant dividends, whose price is fixed via Walrasian...

Analyzing a large sample of Italian firms we find that the probability of default increases with size. This contrasts with the common observation, based on measures of exit from business registry data, that firms' death rate is inversely related to the scale of their operation and suggests a...

The upper tail of the firm size distribution is often assumed to follows a Power Law behavior. Recently, using different estimators and on different data sets, several papers conclude that this distribution follows the Zipf Law, that is that the fraction of firms whose size is above a given...

Since the seminal work of Teece et al. (1994) firm diversification has been found to be a non-random process. The hidden deterministic nature of the diversification patterns is usually detected comparing expected (under a null hypothesys) and actual values of some statistics. Nevertheless the...

It is widely accepted that in liberalized electricity markets log-returns display fat-tailed densities. Besides qualitative assessments, so far precise characterizations of the shape of the distribution have been seldom provided. In this work, we characterize the conditional and unconditional...

The size distribution and growth rates dynamics of U.S. manufacturing firms have been extensively studied by many authors. In this paper, using the COMPUSTAT database, we extend the analysis to disaggregated data, studying 15 industrial sectors. We find that among the stylized facts presented in...

Using an analytically solvable equilibrium model, we study how the distribution of economic activities is affected by the trade-off between pecuniary externalities, as dependent on transportation costs, and localized technological externalities, as dependent on inter-regional spillovers. We...