A note on Gibrat’s law, Gibrat’s legacy and firm growth: Evidence from Brazilian companies

The aim of this work is to test the Gibrat's Law hypothesis for Brazilian firms. Gibrat's Law establishes that firm growth is a random walk, it means that the probability of a given proportionale change in size during a specified period is the same for all firms in a given industry. This work uses information from manufacturing and services sectors, and it uses two different variables to compute firm growth: The growth of employment and the growth of value added. Gibrat's Law was rejected for the complete sample of manufacturing and services firms- the smaller companies grow at larger rates. On the other hand, Gibrat's Law is supported in both sectors when a subsample of large and well-established companies is used (Gibrat's Legacy). These results corroborate the recent stylized facts of the literature. I thank IPEA and IBGE for logistical support and Shane Greenstein for comments. The data used in this paper are confidential but the authors access is not exclusive