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

This work analyses the properties of corporate growth in a largelongitudinal sample of Italian manufacturing firms. In particular,it focuses on the statistical properties of growth rates andon the influence of proxies for relative efficiency upon relativegrowth. In line with previous work, the emergence of ‘fattails’ in growth rate distributions and the idiosyncraticnature of autocorrelation coefficients confirm the existenceof a structure in the growth process richer than the one normallyassumed by the ‘Gibrat Law’ hypothesis and suggestthe presence of firm-specific drivers of growth. At the sametime, there is a remarkable puzzle concerning the absence ofany negative relationship between size and growth variance andonly weak influences of relative efficiencies upon growth dynamics.