A look at the relationship between industrial dynamics and aggregate fluctuations

Starting with the pioneering work of [23], the study of the determinants and the shape of the steady-state distribution of firms’ size has long fascinated economists. While the conventional view received from the seminal work of e.g. [29], [27] and [42] holds that the firms’ size distribution is significantly right-skewed and approximately log-normal, recent empirical research has lent support to the view suggested by H. Simon and his co-author ([32]), according to whom a Pareto-Levy (or power law) distribution seems to return a better fit to the data for the whole distribution ([3]), or at least for its upper tail (Ramsden and Kiss-Haypal, 2000; [18]).