Abstract
What determines the size distribution of business firms? What kind of firm dynamics may be underlying observed firm size distributions? Which candidate distributions may be used for fitting purposes? We here address these questions from a stochastic model perspective. We construct a firm dynamics process that leads to a Dagum distribution of firm size at equilibrium. An empirical study shows that the proposed model captures the empirical regularities of firm size distributions with considerable accuracy.
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Notes
- 1.
Data source: Aida, http://aida.bvdinfo.com/.
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Acknowledgements
We are indebted to Angiola Pollastri for her constant help and support, to Lisa Crosato for kindly sharing her experience with us, and to Simone Alfarano for his careful reading of an earlier draft that he contributed to improve with valuable comments. Helpful suggestions from two referees and from participants in CLADAG 2017 are gratefully acknowledged.
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Fiori, A.M., Motta, A. (2019). Stochastic Models for the Size Distribution of Italian Firms: A Proposal. In: Greselin, F., Deldossi, L., Bagnato, L., Vichi, M. (eds) Statistical Learning of Complex Data. CLADAG 2017. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21140-0_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21140-0_12
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