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.