On the Robustness of the Fat-Tailed Distribution of Firm Growth Rates: A Global Sensitivity Analysis

Abstract

Firms grow and decline by relatively lumpy jumps which cannot be accounted by the cumulation of small, "atom-less", independent shocks. Rather "big" episodes of expansion and contraction are relatively frequent. More technically, this is revealed by fat tail distributions of growth rates. This applies across different levels of sectoral disaggregation, across countries, over different historical periods for which there are available data. What determines such property? In Dosi et al., (2015) we implemented a s…