Measurement of enterprise mobility among size classes, taking into account business demography

Camilla Ferretti

doi:10.21307/stattrans-2021-003

Measurement of enterprise mobility among size classes, taking into account business demography

Camilla Ferretti DISES, Univ. Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Piacenza, Italy ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4508-5127 Statistics in Transition new series, vol. 22, 2021, 1, pages: 55–73 Published online: 3 March 2021 DOI 10.21307/stattrans-2021-003

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ABSTRACT

A extensive body of literature is devoted to the production of mobility measures based on transition matrices. The applications often involve panel data, and yet the impact of demographic events on enterprise mobility is not considered. The article aims provide a definition of enterprise mobility, in terms of the capability to create or liquidate jobs. Moreover, some existing mobility measures are modified so that they also take into account newborn and exiting firms. The proposed index has all the relevant basic properties which make it a rigorous descriptive statistics. The mobility of Italian capital-owned enterprises in the years 2010 – 2017 is analysed in the case study.
What we propose may be an alternative tool for practitioners to measure the degree of mobility in the presence of demographic events. It may be considered an initial step in future research regarding its different applications (e.g. labour market flows or movements among income classes), also considering more complex theoretical backgrounds.

KEYWORDS

mobility measure; transition matrix; firm size; business demography

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