In this paper we test both sunk cost and strategic size liability predictions by looking at the exit behavior of a sample of Italian manufacturing plants. For this purpose, we focus on plants' size and ownership status. In particular, we distinguish independent plants from plants that belong to...

We show that, in a large class of models, market frictions lead to predictable dynamic patterns of the acquisition and subsequent shedding of inputs by firms. The logic is as follows. During high demand and expansionary periods, firms that fail to have inputs (machinery, labor, space, credit) in...

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...

Measuring the extent to which a firm is financially constrained is critical in assessing capital structure. Extant measures of financial constraints focus on macro firm characteristics such as age and size – variables highly correlated with other firm attributes. We parse 10-K disclosures...

This paper studies the impact of size on labor cost and productivity for Italian manufacturing firms. The distributions of both labor cost and productivity display a wide support, even when disaggregated by sector of industrial activity. Further, both labor cost and productivity, when considered...

The distribution of firm sizes is known to be heavy tailed. In order to account for this stylized fact, previous studies have focused mainly on growth through investments in a company's own operations (internal growth). Thereby, the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on the firm size...

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...

This paper relates firm-level processes and size distributions of firms at the industry level. An analytically tractable model explores how firm growth, exit, and spinoff activity in combination with systematically appearing growth crises in organizational development translate into specific...

This work explores a number of properties investigated in the empirical literature on firm size and growth dynamics: (i) the distribution and the autoregressive structure of firm size; (ii) the existence of size-growth scaling relationships; (iii) the distribution and the autoregressive structure...

The paper investigates whether liquidity constraints affect firm size and growth dynamics using a large longitudinal sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We run standard panel-data Gibrat regressions, suitably expanded to take into account liquidity constraints (proxied by cash flow scaled by...