Resilience and Gibrat’s law: Methodological considerations and empirical applications

This paper provides a new interpretation of resilience in the light of the Gibrat’s law. Resilience refers to the ability of a system to react to shocks, returning to the initial state. Gibrat’s law states that the growth of a particular entity is independent of its initial size. The occurrence of Gibrat’s law should therefore reduce the ability of an economic system to resist or to bounce back to the conditions that precede the shock. Our results show that – even if not perfectly – we can define a relationship between resilience and Gibrat’s law for the Italian regions.