The paper presents a new framework to assess firm level heterogeneity and to study the rate and direction of technical change. Building on the analysis of revealed short-run production functions by Hildenbrand (1981), we propose the (normalized) volume of the zonotope composed by vectors-firms...

This article explores the dynamics of market selection by investigating of the relationships linking productivity, profitability, investment and growth, based on China's manufacturing firm-level dataset over the period 1998-2007. First, we find that productivity variations, rather than relative...

Evolutionary theories of economic change identify the processes of idiosyncratic learningby 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 and...

In this work we analyze the relationship between the patterns of firm diversification, if any, across product lines and across bodies of innovative knowledge, proxied by the patent classes where the firm is present. Putting it more emphatically we investigate the relationship between "what a...

This paper discusses, first, the properties of scientific and technological knowledge and the institutions supporting its generation and its economic applications. The evidence continues to support the broad interpretation which we call the "Stanford-Yale-Sussex" synthesis. Second, such patterns...

This paper builds upon a view of economic system and individual economic organization as problem-solving arrangements and presents a simple model of adaptive problem-solving driven by trial-and-error and collective selection. The institutional structure, and in particular its degree of...

The purpose of this work is to present a sort of short selective guide to an enormous and diverse literature on learning processes in economics. We argue that learning is an ubiquitous characteristic of most economic and social systems but it acquires even greater importance in explicitly...

The paper presents a model of endogenous growth in which firms are modeled as boundedly-rational, locally interacting, agents. Firms produce a homogeneous good employing technologies located in an open-ended technological space and are allowed to either imitate existing, similar practices or to...

The work studies the processes of growth of the world top 150 pharmaceutical firms, on the grounds of an original database which allows also disaggregate analysis at the level of single therapeutical classes and chemical entities.Our findings show that the industry -whose long-term evolution is...