AN APPLIED ECONOMETRICIANS VIEW OF LARGE COMPANY PERFORMANCE

This paper contains a brief survey of recent empirical work on the per formance of large companies. It tries to pull together the literature in the form of six stylized facts, illustrating them with data drawn f rom a single sample. The paper concludes by highlighting the issues wh ich are thrown up for future work. These are: accounting for persisten t heterogeneities between firms, accounting for the apparently erratic performance of many firms and, finally, moving away from hypothesis t esting driven empirical agendas.