Gibrat's law for counties in medieval England: an empirical study

Abstract

The article investigates a distributional implication of Gibrat's Law (GL) in the context of English counties in the eleventh century, taking as reference population data from the Domesday Book. Tests for the log-normality of the size distribution (including specific assessments of the skewness and kurtosis) provided evidence that favours the prevalence of GL.

Notes

¹There exists an extensive literature on the Domesday Book (see, e.g. Darby, 1977, for a general introduction).

²Later, the literature on distributional skewness considered models with entry and exit dynamics and shifted the discussion to Pareto distributions as summarized in Vining (1976).

³Different information from the Domesday Book can be downloaded from http://www.domesdaybook.net.

⁴See Siegel and Castellan Jr (1988).

⁵Similar procedures were used by Resende (2004a) for testing the log-normality of the size distribution of manufacturing firms in Brazil. In that context, the rejection of Gibrat's law was very strong.