Testing Gibrat's Law: Empirical Evidence from a Panel of Portuguese Manufacturing Firms

Blandina Oliveira, Adelino Fortunato
2006 International Journal of the Economics of Business  
The purpose of this paper is to use Dynamic Panel Data (DPD) models to see if Gibrat's law holds and to analyse the empirical determinants of firm growth. This paper makes significant contributions to the empirical literature on the dynamics of firm growth, since it updates the work carried out by previous researchers in this field using micro panel data and GMM estimators. To conduct this study we use an unbalanced panel of Portuguese manufacturing firms over the period from 1990 to 1999. The
more » ... ain implication of our findings is that firm growth is not quite random since there are some determinants which exert influence on firm growth.
doi:10.1080/13571510500519996 fatcat:4yroy6ygt5funf2mot5k5rkaia