title: Zipf distribution of U.S. firm sizes.
abstract: Analyses of firm sizes have historically used data that included limited samples of small firms, data typically described by lognormal distributions. Using data on the entire population of tax-paying firms in the United States, I show here that the Zipf distribution characterizes firm sizes: the probability a firm is larger than size s is inversely proportional to s. These results hold for data from multiple years and for various definitions of firm size.
authors.affiliation: Center on Social and Economic Dynamics, The Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036, USA. raxtell@brookings.edu.
authors.forename: R L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Axtell