Box-Cox quantile regression and the distribution of firm sizes (replication data)

DOI

Using the Box-Cox quantile regression model, we analyse the size distribution of firms in Portuguese manufacturing during the 1980s. Specifically, we estimate the effect of selected industry attributes on the location, scale, skewness and kurtosis of the conditional size distributions of firms. We find that industry attributes affect the size of firms in the same direction across the distribution, but the effects of these variables are typically much greater at the largest quantiles. Over time the distribution shifted towards smaller firms, due mainly to the way the economy responds to industry characteristics rather than to changes of the level of these characteristics. The prediction of lognormality, implied by Gibrat's Law, is soundly rejected by the observed distribution of firm sizes. However, we found that, at least in 1983, lognormality is a reasonable description of the conditional size distribution.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.15456/jae.2022314.0707683306
Metadata Access https://www.da-ra.de/oaip/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:oai.da-ra.de:776314
Provenance
Creator Machado, José A. F.; Mata, José
Publisher ZBW - Leibniz Informationszentrum Wirtschaft
Publication Year 2000
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY); Download
OpenAccess true
Contact ZBW - Leibniz Informationszentrum Wirtschaft
Representation
Language English
Resource Type Collection
Discipline Economics