ABSTRACT
Firms are one of the fundamental economic units and are ever-changing. They are born, grow, adapt, marry, breed, divorce and die. Their constancy and commercial success are determined by both the external economic environments in which they operate, as well as the internal decision-making and processes they foster. While much study and measurement of construction activity tends to focus on the project as the unit of analysis, economists tend to consider this unit as inferior to that of the firm. When examining industries, definable as sets of firms that share some common means of technology in their production processes to form the supply side of economic output, the firm becomes the obvious unit for comparison. A variety of search steps can be defined based on the availability and value of a full spectrum of financial variables and firm characteristics, as well as data on location, ownership and industrial sector using standard industrial classification codes.
