Studying Firm Growth Distributions with a Large Administrative Employment Database

Dixon Jay (), Robert Petrunia and Anne-Marie Rollin ()
Additional contact information
Dixon Jay: Statistics Canada, 100 Tunney’s Pasture Driveway, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0T6

Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), 2018, vol. 238, issue 3-4, 189-221

Abstract: This paper uses business tax administrative data to describe the annual firm growth rate distribution in Canada over the 2000–2009 period. This administrative tax database provides a unique lense to study firm growth as it allows us to look at the universe of Canadian employer firms and investigate the firm growth distribution across different dimensions. A non-normal, fat-tailed shape for the firm growth distributions holds across years, industries, regions, as well as firm size and age classes. The results show that the distributions of employment growth rates in Canada have more density in both the center and tails than a normal distribution. The evidence paints a picture of firm growth dynamics whereby most firms change very little each year, while a nontrivial amount also markedly grow or decline. A final finding is that young firms, aged four or less, represent a special case with an upwardly skewed distribution and a median growth rate greater than zero.

Keywords: administrative data; firm growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2018-0015 (text/html)

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jns:jbstat:v:238:y:2018:i:3-4:p:189-221:n:2

DOI: 10.1515/jbnst-2018-0015

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik) is currently edited by Peter Winker

More articles in Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik) from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().