Evolutionary theories of economic change identify the processes of idiosyncratic learning by individual firms and of market selection as the two main drivers of the dynamics of industries. Are such processes able to robustly account for the statistical regularities which industrial structures...

We propose an aggregate growth index that explicitly accounts for non-normality in the micro-economic distribution of firm growth rates and for the presence of a negative scaling relation between their volatility and the size of the firm. Using Compustat data on US publicly traded company, we...

Literature on climate change and extreme events has found conflicting and often weak results on the evolution of economic damages related to natural disasters, although climate change is likely to bring about an increase in their magnitude (Van Aalst, 2006; IPCC, 2007, 2012). These studies usually...

Firms grow and decline by relatively lumpy jumps which cannot be accounted by the cumulation of small, "atom-less", independent shocks. Rather "big" episodes of expansion and contraction are relatively frequent. More technically, this is revealed by fat tail distributions of growth rates. This...

The approximate agents' wealth and price invariant densities of the prediction market model presented in Kets et al.(2014) is derived using the Fokker-Planck equation of the associated continuous-time jump process. We show that the approximation obtained from the evolution of log-wealth...

Analyzing a comprehensive database of limited liability manufacturing firms this paper investigates the relation between a firm’s financial situation and its conditional expected growth rate. Specifically, using quantile regressions, we obtain a quantitative characterization of this relation...

The upper tail of the firm size distribution is often assumed to follows a Power Law behavior. Recently, using different estimators and on different data sets, several papers conclude that this distribution follows the Zipf Law, that is that the fraction of firms whose size is above a given...

Recent empirical findings suggest that macroeconomic variables are seldom normally distributed. For example, the distributions of aggregate output growth-rate time series of many OECD countries are well approximated by symmetric exponential-power (EP) densities, with Laplace fat tails. In this...