The paper investigates the differences between small, medium-sized and large firms regarding their performance in the introduction of new products and processes. After a review of the relevant literature, two models are proposed and tested in search for different business strategies and innovation inputs connected to product and process innovations. The empirical analysis uses innovation survey...

Sutton (1998) has recently proposed a theoretical lower bound to firm size inequality when a market is made of several independent submarkets. His results are valid asymptotically, as the number of submarkets becomes arbitrarily large. We show that, in small samples, his results can be interpreted as a positive relationship between an index of firm size inequality and the number of submarkets. ...

What is meant by ‘satisfaction’ The WERS questions contained some measures that asked about satisfaction, for example with pay. But other measures asked for ratings of the quality of managers while yet others asked about the level of job autonomy. Other work by Edwards and Sen Gupta, with Chin-Ju Tsai, on the nature of jobs in small firms has deployed the term ‘self-reported job quality’ (SRJQ)...

Analogous to the well-documented firm size-wage differential there also exists a differential in layoff risk according to firm size. Using Austrian data I discuss several reasons for this puzzle, including on-the-job training and workers' heterogeneity. If less stable (and also less able) workers select themselves into small, unstable and low paying firms, predicted layoff risk of workers can b...

Firm Size, Economic Situation and Influence Activities This paper discusses the optimal firm size in the presence of influence activities, and the level of individual rent-seeking dependent on the economic situation of the firm. Since firm size has a discouraging effect on the level of individual rent-seeking but also a quantity effect as the number of rent-seekers increases, the interplay of b...

This research was funded by four pharmaceutical companies and by the Sloan Foundation. Their support is gratefully acknowledged. We would also like to express our appreciation to all of those firms that contributed data to the study, to Bronwyn Hall, Richard Caves and Zvi Griliches, and to seminar participants at Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, MIT, the NBER, Northwestern, Stanford, UBC and UCLA for...

While most studies find evidence of a wage-firm size premium, we find that larger firms in China actually pay lower wages. We also find that the most plausible explanation for this result is that larger firms in China employ a higher ratio of blue-collar workers.

This paper discusses the optimal firm size in the presence of internal rent seeking. Since firm size has a discouragement effect on the level of individual rent-seeking but also a quantity effect as the number of rent-seekers increases, the interplay of both effects — together with technological considerations — determines whether the employer chooses an inefficiently small or large firm size. ...

The shape and evolution of firm size distribution has been studied in industrial organization and labor economics. The standard hypothesis of Gibrat’s law of proportionate effect posits that the rate of firm growth is size-independent. We test Gibrat’s law using a new empirical methodology and considering the underinvestigated Brazilian case. Quantile regression is used to estimate the evolutio...