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...

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...

Recent empirical analyses on different datasets have revealed a common exponential behaviour in the shape of the probability density of the corporate growth rates. We briefly review these analyses and present new evidence on this topic based on corporate data from Italian Manufacturing Industry....

The size distribution and growth rates dynamics of U.S. manufacturing firms have been extensively studied by many authors. In this paper, using the COMPUSTAT database, we extend the analysis to disaggregated data, studying 15 industrial sectors. We find that among the stylized facts presented in...

We present empirical evidence on diversification patterns in Italian manufacturing firms and detect a robust relationship between firm size and diversification levels, with an elasticity of diversification that does not depend on firm size and is well below unity. Diversification does not lead...

In this work we explore some basic properties of the size distributions of firms and of their growth processes both at aggregate and disaggregate levels. First, we investigate which properties of firm's size distributions and growth dynamics are robust under disaggregation. Second, at a...