0000000000003198
AUTHOR
J. T. Lunardi
Do firms share the same functional form of their growth rate distribution? A statistical test
We introduce a new statistical test of the hypothesis that a balanced panel of firms have the same growth rate distribution or, more generally, that they share the same functional form of growth rate distribution. We applied the test to European Union and US publicly quoted manufacturing firms data, considering functional forms belonging to the Subbotin family of distributions. While our hypotheses are rejected for the vast majority of sets at the sector level, we cannot rejected them at the subsector level, indicating that homogenous panels of firms could be described by a common functional form of growth rate distribution.
Do Firms Share the Same Functional Form of Their Growth Rate Distribution? A New Statistical Test
We propose a hypothesis testing procedure to investigate whether the same growth rate distribution is shared by all the firms in a balanced panel or, more generally, whether they share the same functional form for this distribution, without necessarily sharing the same parameters. We apply the test to panels of US and European Union publicly quoted manufacturing firms, both at the sectoral and at the subsectoral NAICS levels. We consider the following null hypotheses about the growth rate distribution of the individual firms: i) an unknown shape common to all firms, with all the firms sharing also the same parameters, or with the firm variance related to its firm size through a scaling rela…