Start-up size and industrial dynamics: some evidence from Italian manufacturing

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on industry dynamics in Italy. For this purpose we use a large and comprehensive longitudinal data base, i dentifying the start-up of new manufacturing firms and their subsequent pos t-entry performance. This enables us to link the survival and growth of fir ms in each manufacturing industry specifically to their start-up size. Whil e in a tobit regression (at the two-digit level) we find no evidence to lin k start-up size with survival, the growth rates are negatively and signific antly correlated with initial size. As in previous studies dealing with oth er countries, this evidence suggests that Gibrat's Law fails to hold, at le ast for small, new-born manufacturing firms. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.