We propose an aggregate growth index that explicitly accounts for non-normality in the micro-economic distribution of firm growth rates and for the presence of a negative scaling relation between their volatility and the size of the firm. Using Compustat data on US publicly traded company, we...

This article presents an analysis of the growth patterns of the worldwide top 200 firms in the pharmaceutical industry. A test of the Gibrat's Law of Proportionate Effect is performed and we find, in line with previous literature, a violation concerning the variance of growth. Using...

In this article we study a class of evolutionary models of industrial agglomeration with local positive feedbacks, which allow for a wide set of empirically testable implications. Their roots rest in the Generalized Polya Urn framework. Here, however, we build on a birth-death process over 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...

This work presents a comparative analysis of two crucial dimensions of firms’ performance: profitability and productivity. The characteristics of their empirical distribution and the associated degree of persistence over time are explored through a set of parametric and non-parametric...