ABSTRACT
A puzzling feature of contemporary industrial structure is the relative stability of a skewed distribution of firm-and plant-sizes over all the industrial history for which data can be estimated: approximately, a Pareto distribution. In turn this plausibly implies that the relative frequency of activities and transactions occurring within single organizations as compared to those mediated through the markets has remained roughly constant, despite the secular growth of industrial output and despite the secular tendency toward technical specialization among production tasks (i.e. an increasing “division of labor”). Two other phenomena add to this puzzle. First, sectoral distributions may well look different from the aggregate one (over “industry” or “manufacturing” as a whole) and seem to be also more volatile over time: the clothing industry is quite different from that producing mainframe computers, in terms of size distributions, degrees of concentration, and probably also in terms of variability of market shares of individual firms.
