Corporate Size?Performance Relation across Countries and Industries: Findings from the European Union

According to the leading theories of the firm the size-performance relation is not obvious neither in terms of its significance nor direction. The review of the previous empirical research also provides mixed evidence in the field. The aim of this study is to further explore this relationship by considering two potentially important factors ? the country and industry specificity. In contrast to most studies, where the overall corporate performance often seems to be narrowed to some profitability aspects, this research takes into account a much wider range of corporate performance ratios. The way country and industry features affect size-performance relationship is analysed on a sample of private firms of three sizes from 13 industries across 9 EU countries in the period 2000-2010. The research methodology includes the analysis of variance, taxonomic method of aggregation, linear ranking and adjusted Rand?s measure used for comparing partitions. Findings provide evidence that the variability of the size-performance relationship is both country- and industry-dependent, with a slight dominance of the latter factor.