Investigating the Exponential Age Distribution of Firms
By Alex Coad. 2010
50 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract While several plots of the aggregate age distribution suggest that firm age is exponentially distributed, we find some departures from the exponential benchmark. At the lower tail, we find that very young establishments are more numerous than expected, but they face high exit hazards. At the upper tail, the oldest firms are older than the exponential would have predicted. Furthermore, the age distribution of disaggregated industries (such as the international airline industry) is less regular and can display multimodality. Although we focused on departures from the exponential, we found that the exponential was a useful reference point and endorse it as an appropriate benchmark for future work on industrial structure.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/908e309b6ac2be313ab0dd3fc99ea86b773120e9
How researchers see this paper
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In Economics and Econometrics
- A. Segarra
- Mercedes Teruel
- Fabio Pieri
- Davide Castellani
- G. B. Navaretti
- Jaganaddha Pawan Tamvada
- Alex Coad
- Werner Hölzl
Citations in the corpus
- Like milk or wine: Does firm performance improve with age? (2013, methodology): “Some researchers have focused on the functional form of the aggregate age distribution, showing that the empirical density is well approximated by an exponential distribution (Coad, 2010a), while others have tracked the evolution of the FSD over time, for cohorts of ageing firms (Cabral and Mat”
- Firm growth and barriers to growth among small firms in India (2012, background): “Empirical age distributions are hard to find in the literature, presumably because data on age are not always easy to obtain [but for an early contribution, see Huergo and Jaumandreu (2004); see also Coad (2010) for a survey].”
- Age and firm growth. Evidence from three European countries (2013, background): “In line with Coad (2010), we find the exponential distribution to be a particularly good approximation for firms which are not very young, nor very old.”