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Working Paper
On the U.S. Firm and Establishment Size Distributions
This paper revisits the empirical evidence on the nature of firm and establishment size distributions in the United States using the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), a confidential Census Bureau panel of all non-farm private firms and establishments with at least one employee. We establish five stylized facts that are relevant for the extent of granularity and the nature of growth in the U.S. economy: (1) with an estimated shape parameter significantly below 1, the best-fitting Pareto distribution substantially differs from Zipf's law for both firms and establishments; (2) a lognormal ...
Working Paper
Truncated Firm Productivity Distributions and Trade Margins
A standard theoretical prediction is that average exports are independent of tariff rates when the underlying distribution of firm productivities is assumed to be the widely-used Pareto distribution. Assuming that the underlying distribution has no upper bound is undoubtedly inaccurate and produces theoretical results at odds with empirical results. In contrast, we show that upper-truncation of the Pareto distribution makes average exports rise with trade liberalization. This result is derived analytically, and is supported by simulations. We extend our analysis to the cases of lognormal and ...