Facts of US Firm Scale and Growth 1970-2019: An Illustrated Guide

Abstract

This work analyzes data on all public US firms in the 50 year period 1970-2019, and presents 18 stylized facts of their scale, income, growth, return, investment, and dynamism. Special attention is given to (i) identifying distributional forms; and (ii) scale effects --- systematic difference between firms based on their scale of operations. Notable findings are that the Difference-of-Log-Normals (DLN) distribution has a central role in describing firm data, scale-dependent heteroskedasticity is rampant, and small firms are systematically different from large firms.

Keywords: Firm size, firm growth, investment, heavy tails.

JEL Classification: D22, G30, L11, C46