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Science 7 September 2001:
Vol. 293. no. 5536, pp. 1818 - 1820
DOI: 10.1126/science.1062081
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Reports

Zipf Distribution of U.S. Firm Sizes

Robert L. Axtell

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.

Center on Social and Economic Dynamics, The Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036, USA.
Correspondence should be addressed to raxtell{at}brookings.edu.

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