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RESEARCH PAPER
Firm-Size Distribution in Poland: Is Power Law Applicable?
1
Department of Macroeconomics, Institute of Economics, University of Lodz, Poland
2
Department of International Trade, Institute of Economics, University of Lodz, Poland
Submission date: 2020-08-23
Final revision date: 2021-02-13
Acceptance date: 2021-03-18
Publication date: 2021-06-29
Corresponding author
GNPJE 2021;306(2):31-49
KEYWORDS
JEL CLASSIFICATION CODES
ABSTRACT
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.
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