Data statement
The data for this project is composed of the various firm-level databases, the Penn World Tables for aggregate data, the Doing Business Indicators for the regulation based barriers to entry, and the Small Business Administration for inferring the US’s distribution of firm shares across 2 digit industries. The firm level databases are composed of commercial, confidential, and publicly accessible sources. The commercial database is AMADEUS, which is developed by Bureau Van Dijk (van Dijk, 2018). These can be purchased from the developer or accessed through an affiliation with an institution with an active membership to the data. As explained in the data appendix of the article, the countries selected from AMADEUS for the analysis are: Bulgaria, Belgium, Finland, Portugal, Spain, Latvia, France, Hungary, Romania, and Italy. There are a number of firm-level censuses whose access is confidential, due to agreements between the corresponding statistical agencies and the World Bank. The firm-level Censuses in this category are: El Salvador (2005) , Kenya (2010) , Ethiopia (2010) , Ghana (2003) , Peru (2008) , Pakistan (2005) , Bangladesh (2012) , and Malaysia (2015) . The remaining firm-level datasets are freely accessible from the countries’ statistical agency websites.