Superstar Firms through the Generations

We are grateful to Fatin Alia Md Ali, Chun Hei Hung, Nurul Amin Khan, Koichi Onogi, Sheena Flor Samonte, Ramraj Harikanth Sundararaj, Sue Cat Tuong, Zhiyuan Xu, Yingxuan Yang, Raymon Yue, and Zi Ye for excellent research assistance. We thank George Alessandria, Anmol Bhandari, Serguey Braguinsky, Eric Budish, Paco Buera, Cheng Chen, Gian Luca Clementi, Carter Davis, Lars Peter Hansen, Steve Kaplan, Stephen Redding, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Andrei Shleifer, Chad Syverson, Nico Trachter, Rob Vishny, Michael Weisbach as well as seminar and conference participants at Bank of Canada, BLS, Blue Collar Working Group, Boston College, BSE Summer Forum, U.S. Census Bureau, Chicago Booth, Chicago Fed, Clemson, Cleveland Fed, Colorado Boulder, Frankfurt Macro Seminar, HKUST, LAEF Labor Markets and Macroeconomic Outcomes Conference, MadMac Annual Conference, McGill, Minnesota Corporate Finance Conference, NBER Summer Institute, Notre Dame, Nova, Penn State, Philadelphia Fed, PUC, Purdue, Queensland Corporate Finance Conference, SAIF, SED, St. Louis Fed, Rice University, Rochester, UCSB Firm Dynamics and Growth Conference, and Western University, for helpful suggestions. We acknowledge financial support from the Macro Finance Research Program and the NSF CAREER Award. Any views expressed are those of the authors and not those of the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau has reviewed this data product to ensure appropriate access, use, and disclosure avoidance protection of the confidential source data used to produce this product. This research was performed at a Federal Statistical Research Data Center under FSRDC Project Number 1731 (CBDRB-FY25-P1731-R12291). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.