Investigating the exponentialage distribution of firms

While several plots of the aggregate age distribution suggest that rm age is expo-finentially distributed, we find some departures from the exponential benchmark. At thelower tail, we find that very young establishments are more numerous than expected,but they face high exit hazards. At the upper tail, the oldest firms are older than theexponential would have predicted. Furthermore, the age distribution of internationalairline companies displays multimodality.[...]