Testing Gibrat’s Law: Empirical Evidence from a Panel of Portuguese Manufacturing Firms

Blandina Oliveira () and Adelino Fortunato

No 2003-07, GEMF Working Papers from GEMF - Faculdade de Economia, Universidade de Coimbra

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to use Dynamic Panel Data (DPD) models to see if Gibrat’s law holds and to analyse the empirical determinants of firm growth. This paper makes significant contributions to the empirical literature on the dynamics of firm growth, since it updates the work carried out by previous researchers in this field using micro panel data and GMM estimators. To conduct this study we use an unbalanced panel of Portuguese manufacturing firms over the period from 1990 to 1999. The main implication of our findings is that firm growth is not quite random since there are some determinants which exert influence on firm growth.

Keywords: Firm growth; Gibrat’s law; Panel data; GMM estimators (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L11 C23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Published in International Journal of the Economics of Business, 13(1), 2006, pages 65-81

Downloads: (external link)
http://gemf.fe.uc.pt/workingpapers/pdf/2003/gemf03_07.pdf (application/pdf)

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:gmf:wpaper:2003-07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GEMF Working Papers from GEMF - Faculdade de Economia, Universidade de Coimbra
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Carlos Carreira ().