A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Growth and Profit Rate Distribution: The Spanish Case

We analyse the time evolution of the empirical cross-sectional distribution of firms’ profit and growth rates. In particular, we analyse the conditional properties of the empirical distributions depending on the size of the firms and the business cycle phase. In order to do so, we employ the Laplace distribution as a benchmark, further considering the Subbotin and Asymmetric Exponential Power (AEP hereafter) distributions, to capture the potential asymmetry and leptokurtosis of the empirical distribution. Our results show that the profit rates of large firms are characterised by an asymmetric Laplace distribution with parameters largely independent of the business cycle phase. Small firms, …