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

Understand

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.