A Note on Gibrat's Law, Gibrat''s Legacy and Firm Growth: Evidence from Brazilian Companies

The aim of this work is to test the Gibrat's Law hypothesis for Brazilian firms. Gibrat''s Law establishes that firm growth is a random walk, it means that the probability of a given proportionale change in size during a specified period is the same for all firms in a given industry. This work uses information from manufacturing and services sectors, and it uses two different variables to compute firm growth: The growth of employment and the growth of value added. Gibrat''s Law was rejected for the complete sample of manufacturing and services firms - the smaller companies grow at larger rates. On the other hand, Gibrat''s Law is supported in both sectors when a subsample of large and well-established companies is used (Gibrat''s Legacy). These results corroborate the recent stylized facts of the literature.