Invariances and Diversities in the Evolution of Manufacturing Industries

This work explores and compares some basic properties of corporate growth process at both aggregate industry level and disaggregated sectoral levels. Using an extensive dataset on Italian manufacturing firms, we investigate which properties of firm growth dynamics are robust under disaggregation. We compare the results obtained with three different definitions of firm size, namely total sales, number of employees and value added. Our analysis suggests that while different sectors are characterized by significant differences in firm size distributions, in the degrees of concentration and in the autoregressive structure of the growth processes, there are also regularities which hold across all of them, such as the approximate unit root nature of the growth process and the power exponential shape of the growth rates density. Together, these ‘‘stylized facts’’ suggest challenging puzzles on the drivers of corporate growth and the resulting industrial structures.