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Effects of the turnover rate on the size distribution of firms: An application of the kinetic exchange models

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  • Chakrabarti, Anindya S.

Abstract

We address the issue of the distribution of firm size. To this end we propose a model of firms in a closed, conserved economy populated with zero-intelligence agents who continuously move from one firm to another. We then analyze the size distribution and related statistics obtained from the model. There are three well known statistical features obtained from the panel study of the firms i.e., the power law in size (in terms of income and/or employment), the Laplace distribution in the growth rates and the slowly declining standard deviation of the growth rates conditional on the firm size. First, we show that the model generalizes the usual kinetic exchange models with binary interaction to interactions between an arbitrary number of agents. When the number of interacting agents is in the order of the system itself, it is possible to decouple the model. We provide exact results on the distributions which are not known yet for binary interactions. Our model easily reproduces the power law for the size distribution of firms (Zipf’s law). The fluctuations in the growth rate falls with increasing size following a power law (though the exponent does not match with the data). However, the distribution of the difference of the firm size in this model has Laplace distribution whereas the real data suggests that the difference of the log of sizes has the same distribution.

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  • Chakrabarti, Anindya S., 2012. "Effects of the turnover rate on the size distribution of firms: An application of the kinetic exchange models," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 391(23), pages 6039-6050.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:391:y:2012:i:23:p:6039-6050
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2012.07.014
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