Analysts agree that raising national saving is one of the key objectives of social security reform in the United States. Hence, to judge the merits of proposals requires a comparison of saving responses. The paper outlines the difficulties involved in making those comparisons, which arise from...

The emerging field of corporate demography views corporations and industries in a similar way to human or animal individuals and groups. In spite of a surprisingly large overlap of subject matter with economics, corporate demography is not well-known by, nor easily accessible to economists. An...

The focus of this paper is on the survival principle, as articulated by Milton Friedman, that dominates the methodology of the conventional wisdom either explicitly or implicitly. The survival principle is revised applying the behavioral approach to economics, which differs fundamentally with...

Recent models of firm failure and growth have ignored demand factors. In this paper, we generalize these theoretical analyses to include demand factors in explaining failure and growth for heterogeneous firms in local markets facing imperfect but increasing competition. The model is then applied...

In earlier work byjoskow and by Cummins and VanDerhei, the American Agency system of distribution has been deemed inefficient, i.e. excessively costly. We test this in a natural way by examining whether the system survives in competition with more efficient systems. We find that it survives, but...