BUSINESS CYCLE FLUCTUATIONS AND FIRMS' SIZE DISTRIBUTION DYNAMICS

Domenico Delli Gatti (), Corrado Di Guilmi (), Edoardo Gaffeo, Gianfranco Giulioni (), Mauro Gallegati () and Antonio Palestrini ()
Additional contact information
Edoardo Gaffeo: Department of Economics, University of Trento, Via Inama 5, I-33100 Trento, Italy

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2004, vol. 07, issue 02, pages 223-240

Abstract: Power law behavior is an emerging property of many economic models. In this paper we emphasize the fact that power law distributions are persistent but not time invariant. In fact, the scale and shape of the firms' size distribution fluctuate over time. In particular, on a log–log space, both the intercept and the slope of the power law distribution of firms' size change over the cycle: during expansions (recessions) the straight line representing the distribution shifts up and becomes less steep (steeper). We show that the empirical distributions generated by simulations of the model presented in Ref. 11 mimic real empirical distributions remarkably well.

Keywords: Firms' size distribution; power law; business cycle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscinet.com/cgi-bin/details.cgi?type=pdf&id=pii:S0219525904000160 (application/pdf)
http://www.worldscinet.com/cgi-bin/details.cgi?typ ... ii:S0219525904000160 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:acsxxx:v:07:y:2004:i:02:p:223-240

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) is edited by Frank Schweitzer

More articles in Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Series data maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().