A multistate demographic model for firms in the province of Gelderland

provided by Research Papers in Economics

A multistate demographic model for firms in the province of Gelderland

Corina Huisman¹ and Leo van Wissen^1,2

¹ Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute NIDI, the Netherlands

² Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University Groningen, the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

In the last two decades researchers from various disciplines have made attempts to
model and estimate developments in the size and structure of the population of firms.
Although these attempts give useful insights into possible explanatory factors of firm
dynamics, the explanatory value, and hence predictive power of these models is usually
not very high. In this paper we follow a pure demographic approach for the modelling
of firm survival. Important dimensions of the firm are firm age, firm size (in number of
employees), economic activity and firm location. Using empirical firm level data for the
region of Gelderland in the Netherlands over the period 1986-2002, developments in
survival are described and analysed over time in an age-period-cohort perspective. In a
later phase of the project, these (aggregated) scenarios will serve as a point of reference
for comparisons to more extended model specifications using micro-simulation that
include additional explanatory and spatial variables.

Keywords: demography of the firm, Age-Period-Cohort model, firm survival, closures

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