Composite distributions in the social sciences: A comparative empirical study of firms' sales distribution for France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Spain

Abstract

We study 17 different statistical distributions for sizes obtained from the classical and recent literature to describe a relevant variable in the social sciences and Economics, namely the firms' sales distribution in six countries over an ample period. We find that the best results are obtained with mixtures of lognormal (LN), loglogistic (LL), and log Student's t (LSt) distributions. The single lognormal, in turn, is strongly not selected. We then