TY - JOUR VL - 102 A1 - Pammolli, Fabio A1 - Fu, Dongfeng A1 - Buldyrev, Sergey V. A1 - Riccaboni, Massimo A1 - Matia, Kaushik A1 - Yamasaki, Kazuko A1 - Stanley, H. Eugene PB - National Academy of Sciences SP - 18801 Y1 - 2005/// JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences IS - 52 ID - eprints685 N1 - Cover article EP - 18806 SN - 1091-6490 N2 - We introduce a model of proportional growth to explain the distribution Pg(g) of business-firm growth rates. The model predicts that Pg(g) is exponential in the central part and depicts an asymptotic power-law behavior in the tails with an exponent ? = 3. Because of data limitations, previous studies in this field have been focusing exclusively on the Laplace shape of the body of the distribution. In this article, we test the model at different levels of aggregation in the economy, from products to firms to countries, and we find that the predictions of the model agree with empirical growth distributions and size-variance relationships. TI - The growth of business firms: Theoretical framework and empirical evidence AV - none KW - proportional growth; preferential attachment; Laplace distribution UR - http://www.pnas.org/content/102/52/18801.abstract ER -