The World’s Largest Firms

Abstract

This chapter presents econometric evidence on the theory developed in Chapter 2. Section 4.2 describes the sample, which is based on a world-wide cross-section of large manufacturing firms, and indicates how the key variables have been measured. Section 4.3 develops and summarises the predictions of the theory, emphasising how the hypotheses can be formulated so as to be testable within the limits imposed by data availability. Section 4.4 reviews the statistical methodology. Section 4.5 presents formal tests of the hypotheses. Section 4.6 discusses possible mis-specifications of the statistical relationships and describes tests which have been made to check the sensitivity of the results to specification error. Section 4.7 summarises the main conclusions of the study.