Zipf Distribution of U.S. Firm Sizes-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

Zipf Distribution of U.S. Firm Sizes

Published:2001-09-07 Issue:5536 Volume:293 Page:1818-1820
ISSN:0036-8075
Container-title:Science
language:en
Short-container-title:Science

Author:

Axtell Robert L.¹²

Affiliation:

1. Center on Social and Economic Dynamics, The Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036, USA.

2. Correspondence should be addressed to .

Abstract

Analyses of firm sizes have historically used data that included limited samples of small firms, data typically described by lognormal distributions. Using data on the entire population of tax-paying firms in the United States, I show here that the Zipf distribution characterizes firm sizes: the probability a firm is larger than size s is inversely proportional to s . These results hold for data from multiple years and for various definitions of firm size.

Publisher

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Subject

Multidisciplinary

Reference32 articles.

1. Y. Ijiri H. A. Simon Skew Distributions and the Sizes of Business Firms (North-Holland New York 1977).

2. R. Gibrat Les Inégalitiés Économiques; Applications: aux inégalitiés des richesses à la concentration des entreprises aux populations des villes aux statistiques des familles etc. d'une loi nouvelle la loi de l'effet proportionnel (Librarie du Recueil Sirey Paris 1931).

3. Sutton J., J. Econ. Lit. XXXV, 40 (1997).

4. G. K. Zipf Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (Addison-Wesley Reading MA 1949).

5. J. Steindl Random Processes and the Growth of Firms (Hafner New York 1965).

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