IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_13085.html

Firm Size Distribution and Power Laws in Brazil: Empirical Evidence

Author

Listed:
  • Marcelo Resende
  • Vicente Cardoso

Abstract

This paper investigates power laws for the firm size distribution in Brazil for the largest 1000, 500 and 100 firms. A systematic nested testing strategy is implemented and stronger evidence for a Pareto type I distribution emerges only for the extreme upper tail of the distribution (top 100 firms). The Pareto exponents for the top 100 firms display a statistically significant downward trend and a structural break in 2010. Their mean falls from approximately 1.27 in 1999–2009 to 1.05 in 2010–2024, approaching the Zipf benchmark of 1 and indicating a thicker upper tail and greater revenue concentration among superstar firms.

Suggested Citation

  • Marcelo Resende & Vicente Cardoso, 2026. "Firm Size Distribution and Power Laws in Brazil: Empirical Evidence," CESifo Working Paper Series 13085, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_13085
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp13085.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C12 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Hypothesis Testing: General
    • C49 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Other
    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_13085. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.