Recent studies find that idiosyncratic risk (IR) has increased since the 1960's and attribute this to economy wide factors such as the role of the IT revolution. To gain further insights into why IR has increased over time, our paper uses industry level data and firm level data to study if...

The paper studies the dynamics of firm growth and firm size distributions in the pharmaceutical industry from 1950 to 2003 and in the biotechnology industry from the early 1980's to 2003. Growth dynamics are studied in the context of how the size composition of firms changes, how innovation...