Firm growth: empirical analysis

Alex Coad () and Werner Hölzl

Papers on Economics and Evolution from Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography

Abstract: Recent research has led to the empirical regularity that firm growth rate distributions are heavy tailed. This finding implies that a few firms experience spectacular growth rates and decline, but that most firms have marginal growth rates. The literature on high growth firms shows that high growth firms are the central drivers of job creation in the economy but that these firms are neither clustered in high technology sectors nor are these firms necessarily young and small. The evidence on the determinants of firm growth confirms that firm growth is difficult to predict. The finding that firm growth is well approximated by a random process does not only reflect the heterogeneity at the firm level but is also associated with the low persistence of growth rates over time.

Keywords: firm; growth; Length; 25; pages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L11 L25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ent and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://137.248.191.199/RePEc/esi/discussionpapers/2010-02.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server 137.248.191.199: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

Related works:
Chapter: Firm Growth: Empirical Analysis (2012)
Working Paper: Firm Growth: Empirical Analysis (2010)
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:esi:evopap:2010-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers on Economics and Evolution from Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography Deutschhausstrasse 10, 35032 Marburg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christoph Mengs ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).