  We introduce a new statistical test of the hypothesis that a balanced panel
of firms have the same growth rate distribution or, more generally, that they
share the same functional form of growth rate distribution. We applied the test
to European Union and US publicly quoted manufacturing firms data, considering
functional forms belonging to the Subbotin family of distributions. While our
hypotheses are rejected for the vast majority of sets at the sector level, we
cannot rejected them at the subsector level, indicating that homogenous panels
of firms could be described by a common functional form of growth rate
distribution.
