Before revision:  Pareto distributions are generally traced back to a mechanism of proportional random growth, based on a regime of constant returns to scale : this makes our evidence of an "interrupted" Pareto distribution all the more puzzling, because we provide evidence that financial firms in our sample  operate in such a regime.
After revision:  Pareto distributions are generally traced back to a mechanism of proportional random growth, based on a regime of constant returns to scale . This makes our findings of an ``interrupted'' Pareto distribution all the more puzzling, because we provide evidence that financial firms in our sample operate in such a regime.