Does Gibrat's law hold for retailing? Evidence from Sweden

Sven-Olov Daunfeldt, Niklas Elert () and Lang, Ã…sa

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2012, vol. 19, issue 5, 464-469

Abstract: Gibrat's Law predicts that firm growth is a purely random effect and therefore should be independent of firm size. The purpose of this paper is to test Gibrat's law within the retail industry, using a novel data-set comprising all surviving Swedish limited liability companies active at some point between 1998 and 2004. Very few studies have previously investigated whether Gibrat's Law seems to hold for retailing, and they are based on highly aggregated data. Our results indicate that Gibrat's Law can be rejected for a large majority of five-digit retail industries in Sweden, since small retail firms tend to grow faster than large ones.

Keywords: Firm dynamics; Firm size; Firm growth; Retail industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Working Paper: Does Gibrat’s Law Hold for Retailing? Evidence from Sweden (2011)
Working Paper: Does Gibrat’s Law Hold for Retailing? Evidence from Sweden (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joreco:v:19:y:2012:i:5:p:464-469

DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2012.06.001

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