Industry dynamics in biotechnology

The field of modern biotechnology is thought to have largely begun in 1980, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that a genetically-modified microorganism could be patented. The growth of the Biotechnology industry has stimulated extensive research on its determinants. One of the areas which has attracted a fair amount of attention is the distribution of firm size within an industry. What is less known however, is the dynamics of firm size. This paper considers a statistical model to describe the spatial dynamics of firm size across the biotechnology industry. It is found that firm size fluctuates around its long run stationary equilibrium according to a temporal drift and random disturbance. The empirical results illustrate that diffusion is a potential technique for the analysis of spatial dynamics of firm size.