If business firms face a multiplicative growth process in which their growth rates are independent from their sizes, then these sizes cannot be distributed according to a stationary Pareto distribution. At the same time , the Laplace distribution of growth rates cannot be easily reconciled with...

Since the seminal work of Pareto, many empirical analyses suggested that the distribution of firms size is characterized by an asymptotic power like behavior. At the same time, recent investigations show that the distribution of annual growth rates of business firms displays a remarkable...

This work brings together two distinct pieces of evidence concerning, at the macro level, international distributions of incomes and their dynamics, and, at the micro level, the size distributions of firms and the properties of their growth rates. First, our empirical analysis provides a new...

This note contests a widely cited, used and derived ‘result’ according to which Gibrat’s law implies Zipf’s law. I show that this result is only true under strict, unrecognized and ad hoc additional conditions some of which are even inconsistent with the economic models that have been...