Firm Performance and Evolution: Empirical Regularities in the US Microdata

This paper explores what we know and how we think about firm performance, firm and industry evolution, and economic growth. It reports empirical findings from a new literature that focuses explicitly on individual business units. In contrast to traditional empirical studies of competition and economic growth that examine aggregate economic variables such as industry or regional productivity, this new work concentrates on dffirences in the behavior of firms and their business units. The results emerging from these analyses confirm the importance of microeconomic approaches to economic research and place the firm at the center of economic growth.