Growth beyond Gibrat: firm growth processes and strategies

Innovation Strategies and Firm Growth

In this work, we explore the relations between sales growth and a set of innovation indicators that capture the different sources, modes and results of the innovative activity undertaken within firms. We exploit a rich panel on innovation activity of Spanish manufacturing firms, reporting detailed CIS-type information continuously over the period 2004-2011. Standard GMMpanel estimates of the av...

Small Firm Growth and Performance -- . . .

Knowledge constraints and firm growth

Firms are constrained in growing knowledge capital due to frictions on the transfer of firm-specific knowledge (such as the process of recruiting and training skilled labor). Constrained firms must therefore forgo some positive-NPV projects during their growth. I embed micro-founded knowledge constraints in a q-theory model of a firm with two capital goods, structurally estimate the model, and ...

Consumer Search and Firm Growth

This paper presents a simple model of search and matching between consumers and firms. The firm size distribution has a Pareto-like right tail if the population of consumers grows at a positive rate and the mean rate at which incumbent firms gain customers is also positive. This happens in equilibrium when entry is sufficiently costly. As entry costs grow without bound, the size distribution ap...

Generalizing Gibrat: Reasonable Multiplicative Models of Firm Dynamics

Multiplicative models of firm dynamics 'à la Gibrat' have become a standard reference in industrial organization. However, some unpleasant properties of their implied dynamics – namely, their explosive or implosive behaviour (firm size and number collapsing to zero or increasing indefinitely)-have been given only very little attention. In this paper I investigate which modifications to the stan...