On inconsistency of indicators measuring the size of companies: results of correlation analysis of the world's largest corporations

One of the most important issues of empirical researches of industrial markets is the issue of measuring, including the size of companies. In particular, this indicator is important for studying the market concentration and for analyzing the impact of regulatory mechanisms on public welfare. The most informative characteristic reflecting the size of the company is revenue. However, in addition to it, we can take into account the number of workers, assets owned by the company, its capitalization, etc. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate and explain the possible inconsistency of these indicators: despite the fact that for most companies the relationship between them is positive and high, there are exceptions, correlation coefficients can be close to zero or even take negative values. Based on empirical data on corporate reporting of the world's leading companies presented in the Bloomberg database, the article identifies possible data profiles and provides their interpretation, including in the industry context.