We apply a reduced-form vector autoregression model to analyze the growth processes of Italian manufacturing firms, 1989-1997. We focus in particular on lead-lag associations describing the coevolution of employment growth, sales growth, growth of profits and labour productivity growth....

We relate innovation to sales growth for incumbent firms in high-tech sectors. A firm, on average, experiences only modest growth and may grow for a number of reasons that may or may not be related to innovativeness. However, given that the returns to innovation are highly skewed and that growth...

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...

The issue of technological unemployment receives perennial popular attention. Although there are previous empirical investigations that have focused on the relationship between innovation and employment, the originality of our approach lies in our choice of method. We focus on four 2-digit...

We apply a panel vector autoregression model to a firm-level longitudinal database to observe the co-evolution of sales growth, employment growth, profits growth and growth of R&D expenditure. Contrary to expectations, profit growth seems to have little detectable effect on R&D investment....

This paper offers new insights into the processes of firm growth by applying a reducedform vector autoregression (VAR) model to longitudinal panel data on French manufacturing firms. We observe the co-evolution of key variables such as growth of employment, sales, and gross operating surplus, as...

While Gibrat's Law assumes that growth rate variance is independent of size, empirical work has usually found a negative relationship between growth rate variance and firm growth. Using data on French manufacturing firms, we observe a relatively low, but statistically significant, negative...

We investigate the lead-lag relationship between growth of patent applications, growth of R&D, and growth of total sectoral employment for 270 German labour market regions over the period 1999-2005. Our unique panel dataset includes information on four two-digit industries, namely Chemistry,...

Recent work drawing on data for large and small firms has shown a Pareto distribution of firm size. We mix a Gibrat-type growth process among incumbents with an exponential distribution of firm's age, to obtain the empirical Pareto distribution.

This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of different business strategies is conditional on the firm's distance to the industry frontier. We use data on four 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the US over the period 1972-1999, and apply...