The Variance of Firm Growth Rates: The Scaling Puzzle

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The Variance of Firm Growth Rates: The Scaling Puzzle

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John Sutton

Abstract

Certain recently reported statistical regularities relating to the dispersion of firms' growth rates have begun to attract attention among IO economists. These relationships take the form of power law or scaling relationships and this has led to suggestions that the underlying mechanisms which drive these relationships may have some interesting analogies with the mechanisms which drive scaling relationships in other fields. In particular, it has led to suggestions that there may be some subtle correlations among the growth rates of the different constituent businesses that comprise the firm.In this paper, I report some new empirical evidence in this area and I put forward a new candidate explanation for the relationships we observe. This candidate explanation does not rely on any correlation mechanisms; rather, it is consistent with the view that the typical firm consists of a number of (approximately) independent businesses. The size distribution of the constituent businesses within firms is modelled by reference to an analogy with the partitions of an integer.

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Paper provided by Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE in its series STICERD - Economics of Industry Papers with number 27.

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Date of creation: Sep 2001
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Handle: RePEc:cep:stieip:27

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References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

Youngki Lee & Luis A. N. Amaral & David Canning & Martin Meyer & H. Eugene Stanley, 1998. "Universal features in the growth dynamics of complex organizations," Quantitative Finance Papers cond-mat/9804100, arXiv.org. [Downloadable!]

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(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

John Sutton, 2001. "Rich Trades, Scarce Capabilities: Industrial Development Revisited," STICERD - Economics of Industry Papers 28, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE. [Downloadable!]
F. Clementi & M. Gallegati, 2005. "Pareto's Law of Income Distribution: Evidence for Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States," Quantitative Finance Papers physics/0504217, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2006. [Downloadable!]
Other versions:
- Fabio Clementi & Mauro Gallegati, 2005. "Pareto's Law of Income Distribution: Evidence for Grermany, the United Kingdom, and the United States," Microeconomics 0505006, EconWPA. [Downloadable!]

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This page was last updated on 2009-12-15.

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