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Long-term firm growth properties derived from short-term laws of sales and number of employees in Japan and France

Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review volume 13, pages 409–422 (2016)Cite this article

Abstract

In Japan, we observed rapid power law growth in the first 10 years of the existence of firms and subsequent slow exponential growth on their ages not only in their sales but also in their number of employees. We also confirmed similar long-term properties in France. These observations were found by employing around one million bits of exhaustive financial data of firms in Japan and France from 2004 to 2013. Comparing the parameters, the power law and exponential growth indices of sales are larger than those of the number of employees. Such long-term growth is derived from non-Gibrat’s law in the middle-scale range and Gibrat’s law in the large-scale range. We observed both non-Gibrat’s law and Gibrat’s law, which denotes the dependence of the growth rate distributions on the initial values, for two successive years in the short-term. By introducing a stochastic model based on the short-term laws, we showed that non-Gibrat’s law and Gibrat’s law lead to power law growth and the subsequent exponential growth, respectively.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University. Discussions during the YITP workshop YITP-W-15-15 on “Econophysics 2015” were useful to complete this work. This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grants Numbers 24510212 and 24710156.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kanazawa Gakuin University, Kanazawa, Japan

    Atushi Ishikawa & Shouji Fujimoto

  2. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    Takayuki Mizuno

  3. The Graduate University for Advanced Studies [SOKENDAI], Tokyo, Japan

    Takayuki Mizuno

  4. JST PRESTO, Tokyo, Japan

    Takayuki Mizuno

  5. University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Tsutomu Watanabe

Authors
  1. Atushi Ishikawa
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  2. Shouji Fujimoto
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  3. Takayuki Mizuno
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  4. Tsutomu Watanabe
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Correspondence to Atushi Ishikawa.

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Ishikawa, A., Fujimoto, S., Mizuno, T. et al. Long-term firm growth properties derived from short-term laws of sales and number of employees in Japan and France. Evolut Inst Econ Rev 13, 409–422 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40844-016-0055-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40844-016-0055-0

Keywords

  • Econophysics
  • Firm growth
  • Gibrat’s law
  • Non-Gibrat’s law

JEL Classification

  • D39