Corporate growth and industrial structures: some evidence from the Italian manufacturing industry

This work analyses the properties of corporate growth in a large longitudinal sample of Italian manufacturing firms. In particular, it focuses on the statistical properties of growth rates and on the influence of proxies for relative efficiency upon relative growth. In line with previous work, the emergence of ‘fat tails’ in growth rate distributions and the idiosyncratic nature of autocorrelation coefficients confirm the existence of a structure in the growth process richer than the one normally assumed by the ‘Gibrat Law’ hypothesis and suggest the presence of firm‐specific drivers of growth. At the same time, there is a remarkable puzzle concerning the absence of any negative relationship between size and growth variance and only weak influences of relative efficiencies upon growth dynamics.