There is wide variation in the sizes of manufacturing plants, even within the most narrowly defined industry classifications used by statistical agencies. Standard theories attribute all such size differences to productivity differences. This paper develops an alternative theory in which...

Drawing from confidential firm-level balance sheets in 11 European countries, the paper presents a novel sectoral database of comparable productivity indicators built by members of the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet) using a newly developed research infrastructure. Beyond aggregate...

An evolutionary model of the bank size distribution is presented based on the exchange and creation of deposit money. In agreement with empirical results the derived size distribution is lognormal with a power law tail. The theory is based on the idea that the size distribution is the result of...

Conventional wisdom holds that small banks have comparative advantages vis-à-vis large banks in serving small firms, while recent literature suggests this may not be the case. Using a panel of recent US start-ups, we investigate how small bank presence affects these firms in normal times...

The introduction of firm size into labor search models raises the question how wages are set when average and marginal product differ. We develop and analyze an alternative to the existing bargaining framework: Firms compete for labor by publicly posting long- term contracts. In such a...

The upper tail of the firm size distribution is often assumed to follow a Power Law. Several recent papers, using different estimators and different data sets, conclude that the Zipf Law, in particular, provides a good fit, implying that the fraction of firms with size above a given value is...

We study the relative effect of venture capital and bank finance on large manufacturing firms in local U.S. markets. Theory predicts that with venture capital, the firm size distribution should become more stretched-out to the right, but it’s ambiguous on the effect of banks on large firms....

According to Gibrat's Law of Proportionate Effect, the growth rate of a given firm is independent of its size at the beginning of the period examined. While earlier studies tended to confirm the Law, more recent research generally rejects it. This paper reconciles these two streams of...

A positive relationship between firm size and product diversification is a long-standing stylized fact. However, so far there is no appropriate theoretical model to explain the underlying forces of this observation. This paper analyzes an oligopoly model with asymmetric multiproduct firms, which...

This paper investigates how cross-sectional micro-uncertainty influences the investment of small and large firms and discusses the aggregate implications of the heterogeneity in their investment decisions. Empirically, we find that large firms show less investment decline in times of heightened...