Sector, industry and inter-organizational movement statistics in the Stockholm Region: informing organizational growth models

Abstract

Organizational growth processes exhibit interesting statistical regularities, chiefly the heavy-tailed pattern of the size and growth-rate (i.e. yearly change in size) distributions. In spite of its ubiquity, empirical studies of growth are often limited to private activities and specific sectors, and generative models on the other hand are built on simplified assumptions and only aim at reproducing stylized facts. In this study, we use a unique Swedish longitudinal database on employment in the Stockholm Region, to analyze the interplay between organizational growth statistics by ownership sector, industrial activity and inter-organizational employee movements during a period of 14 years. We fit distributions for organizational size and growth rates. We find that the body of the aggregate growth-rate distribution is dominated by public sector growth, while the private sector dominates the tails. Industries with mostly public organizations tend to have a lognormal size distribution, while privately-owned industries are better fitted by a truncated power law. Growth-rate distributions are fitted to an exponential power (Subbotin) distribution. We decompose the change in size into incoming and outgoing employee movements, and find that the distribution of aggregated movements is well approximated by a lognormal distribution. Most organizations that do not grow have however in- and outgoing movements, but these mostly cancel each other out.