When is Gibrat's Law a Law?

Sven-Olov Daunfeldt and Niklas Elert ()

No 158, Ratio Working Papers from The Ratio Institute

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to investigate if the industry context matters for whether Gibrat's law is rejected or not using a dataset that consists of all limited firms in 5-digit NACE-industries in Sweden during 1998-2004. The results reject Gibrat's law on an aggregate level, since small firms grow faster than large firms. However, Gibrat's law is confirmed about as often as it is rejected when industry-specific regressions are estimated. It is also found that the industry context - e.g., minimum efficient scale, market concentration rate, and number of young firms in the industry - matters for whether Gibrat's law is rejected or not.

Keywords: Firm growth; firm size; job creation; small firms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L11 L25 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2010-11-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-com and nep-ent
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Journal Article: When is Gibrat’s law a law? (2013)
Working Paper: When is Gibrat's Law a Law? (2010)
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