Firm-Size Distribution in Poland: Is Power Law Applicable?

• Authors: Piotr Gabrielczak , Tomasz Serwach

Title variants

PL

Rozkład wielkości firm w Polsce - czy ma zastosowanie prawo potęgowe?

Abstracts

PL

Artykuł koncentruje się na istnieniu praw potęgowych w rozkładzie wielkości firm w Polsce. Przetestowano empirycznie, czy rozkład wielkości firm w Polsce ma cechy prawa Zipfa – szczególnego przypadku prawa potęgowego obserwowanego w wielu różnych kontekstach w literaturze ekonomicznej. W analizie wykorzystano dane z roku 2019, dotyczące 2000 największych przedsiębiorstw w Polsce, notowanych na Liście 2000 „Rzeczpospolitej”. Dokonano przeglądu teoretycznych mechanizmów generujących prawa potęgowe, a w analizie empirycznej zastosowano kilka estymatorów wykładnika potęgi. Uzyskane przez nas wyniki potwierdzają istotne statystycznie odchylenia od prawa Zipfa w przypadku rozkładu wielkości firm w Polsce. Znaleźliśmy dowody na to, że prawo potęgowe nie jest w stanie w zadowalający sposób aproksymować rozkładu firm opartego na sprzedaży.

EN

This article focuses on the existence of power laws in the firm-size distribution in Poland. Specifically, we empirically test whether the size distribution of companies in Poland has the characteristics of Zipf ’s law, a special case of power law observed in many different contexts in empirical economic literature. Our analysis uses 2019 data on the 2,000 largest companies in Poland as ranked by the Rzeczpospolita daily newspaper in its “Lista 2000” (Top 2,000 List). We reviewed theoretical mechanisms generating power laws and used several estimators of the power-law exponent in our empirical analysis. Our results confirm statistically significant deviations from Zipf ’s law in the firm-size distribution in Poland. We found evidence that the power law cannot satisfactorily approximate the sales-based distribution of firms.

Keywords

PL

prawo potęgowe; prawo Zipf'a; rozkład wielkości firm; skalowanie

EN

power law; Zipf's law; firm-size distribution; scaling

• Publisher: Szkoła Główna Handlowa w Warszawie. Kolegium Analiz Ekonomicznych
• Journal: Gospodarka Narodowa. The Polish Journal of Economics
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 306
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 31-49

Dates

published

2021

Contributors

author

Piotr Gabrielczak

• Department of Macroeconomics, Institute of Economics, University of Lodz, Poland

author

Tomasz Serwach

• Department of International Trade, Institute of Economics, University of Lodz, Poland

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Identifiers

DOI

10.33119/GN/134627

Biblioteka Nauki

2033223