The study of firms' default has attracted wide interest among both practitioners and scholars. However, attention has often been limited to a relatively small set of financial variables. In this work, we try to increase the scope of analysis extending the investigation to other possible...

This work explores a number of properties investigated in the empirical literature on firm size and growth dynamics: (i) the distribution and the autoregressive structure of firm size; (ii) the existence of size-growth scaling relationships; (iii) the distribution and the autoregressive structure...

This paper investigates the relevance of financial and economic variables as determinants of firm defaults. Our analysis is not limited to publicly traded companies but extends to a large sample of limited liability firms. We consider size, growth, profitability and productivity together with a...

Theoretical and empirical studies of industry dynamics have extensively focused on the process of growth. Theory predicts production efficiency, profitability and financial status as the central channels through which firms can survive, grow and eventually achieve out- standing growth...

This paper analyzes the patterns of market selection in manufacturing industries of France, Germany, UK, and USA. We first disentangle the contribution to industry-level productivity growth of within-firm productivity changes and between-firms reallocation of shares. The evidence corroborates...

The paper examines the causal effect of financial constraints on firm exports. We exploit a firm-level proxy of constraints based on credit ratings and available for a large panel of Italian exporting and non exporting firms. Our estimation strategy allows to cure for self-selection into exports...

Combining detailed data on export transactions and an informative firm level measure of financing constraints, this paper provides new evidence on the extent and dynamics of product and geographical diversification of constrained exporters. Financial constraints associates with: (i) narrower...

Using data on cross border transactions together with an informative measure of financing constraints this paper provides new evidence that limited access to external capital narrows the scale of foreign sales, the exporters? product scope and the number of trade partners. It shows that...

In this work we investigate two crucial dimensions of firms’ structure and dynamics, that is profitability and productivity performance. The empirical distributions and the associated persistence over time are explored through a set of parametric and non parametric exercises performed on an...

This paper presents a multidimensional empirical analysis of firm growth. Exploiting census data on Italian manufacturing firms, 1989-1997, we estimate a reduced-form VAR to analyze the co-evolution of employment growth, sales growth, growth of profits and labour productivity growth. Our main...