In this paper we provide an analysis of the process of creative destruction across 24 countries and 2-digit industries over the past decade. We rely on a newly assembled dataset that draws from different micro data sources (business registers, census, or representative enterprise surveys). The...

Several surveys on intra-industry dynamics have recently reached the conclusion from a large body of evidence that Gibrat's Law does not hold, i.e., the main finding is that firm growth decreases with firm size. However, almost all of these studies have been based on manufacturing. In this paper...

The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to overinvest into physical assets. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed to explain this stylized fact, most of them focussing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows that...

We demonstrate the possibility of shake-out of firms and emergence of inter-firmheterogeneity along the (socially optimal) dynamic equilibrium path of a competitive industry with freeentry and exit, even when there is no uncertainty and all firms are ex ante identical with perfectforesight....

This paper documents that a process of industrial restructuring has been transforming the developed economies, where large corporations are accounting for less economic activity and small firms are accounting for a greatershare of economic activity. Not all countries, however, are experiencing...

The introduction of firm size into labor search models raises the question how wages are set when average and marginal product differ. We develop and analyze an alternative to the existing bargaining framework: Firms compete for labor by publicly posting long–term contracts. In such a...

We develop a new econometric framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, TFP and markups across firms while leaving the correlation among the three unrestricted. We do this by systematically exploiting assumptions that are implicit in previous firm-level productivity...

We study competition among a score of firms participating in an online market for a commodity computer component. Firms were able to adjust prices continuously; prices determined how the firms were ranked and listed (lowest price listed first), with better ranks contributing to firms’ sales....

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

This paper develops a model of a monopolistically competitive industry with extensive and intensive business investment and shows how these margins respond to changes in average and marginal corporate tax rates. Intensive investment refers to the size of a firm’s capital stock. Extensive...