Growth patterns of US professional services firms.

This paper investigates the growth of professional services firms [PSFs] in the US. It first demonstrates based on a 20 year longitudinal dataset, that Gibrat's law of firm growth doesn't hold for PSFs as the growth rate of their establishment is age and size dependent. While this behavior is shared across the US economy and the notable reference point of US manufacturing firms, US PSFs exhibit a specificity in the development of their firms that exhibit persistence in growth and in their development pattern that relies on the creation of small establishments (