An Applied Econometrician's View of Large Company Performance

This paper contains a brief survey of recent empirical work on the performance of large companies. It tries to pull together the literature in the form of six stylized facts, illustrating them with data drawn from a single sample. The paper concludes by highlighting the issues which are thrown up for future work. These are: accounting for persistent heterogeneities between firms, accounting for the apparently erratic performance of many firms and, finally, moving away from hypothesis testing driven empirical agendas.