Jose A. F. Machado and Jose Mata, "Box-Cox Quantile Regression and the
Distribution of Firm Sizes", Journal of Applied Econometrics, Vol. 15, No.
3, 2000, pp. 289-310.

The data sets employed in the paper are based on data from the Portuguese
Ministry of Employment. To use the data, permission must be obtained from:

 Minstry of Employment
 Department of Statistics
 Rua Rodrigo da Fonseca, 55 
 1250 Lisboa
 Portugal

After having been granted permission to use the data, please write to Jose
Mata at the address below requesting the data sets employed in the paper. 

 Jose Mata
 Economia e Gestao - IST
 Av. Rovisco Pais
 1096 Lisboa
 Portugal

The data sets are in two files (data83.txt, data91.txt), each one
containing the data for one year. There are 18,552 and 26,515
firms in the data sets for 1983 and 1991, respectively.

The data are organized by observation. For each observation (firm)
there are ten variables in the following order:

 firm_size
 age
 growth
 patents
 imports
 exports
 mes
 turbulence
 size
 state

Data on all variables except patents, imports, and exports are from 
an inquiry conducted by the Portuguese Ministry of Employment 
Quadros de Pessoal, hereinafter QP. They are based on 
unpublished data and were computed by the authors as indicated below.
Data on patents, imports, and exports are based on published data 
from the Institute of Statistics.


firm_size is the number of employees in the firm.

age is the logarithm of the length of the longest tenured job in the firm. 

growth is the industry employment growth. 

patents is the ratio Patents/Production in the industry. 

imports is the ratio Imports/Production in the industry. 

exports is the ratio of exports/Production in the industry. 

mes is the logarithm of the measure of the minimum efficient scale
 (MES) in the industry, computed according to Lyons (1980). 

turbulence is  the product between the Entry and Exit rates, 
where Entry and Exit rates are defined respectively as the ratio 
between the employment in new firms and total employment in the 
industry, and as the ratio between the employment in exiting firms
and total employment in the industry. 

size is the logarithm of total employment in the industry. 

state is defined as the share of employment in the industry
accounted for by State-owned enterprises.


Full descriptions of the data sources and variable definitions
are provided in section 2 of the paper.


Jose Mata
Economia e Gestao
Instituto Superior Tecnico
Av. Rovisco Pais
1049 - 001 Lisboa
Portugal
Tel: + 351 - 1 - 841 81 77
Fax: + 351 - 1 - 841 79 79
e-mail: jmata@ist.utl.pt