We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies this to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms with exactly 50 or more employees....

Recent research suggests that the power law is one of the most universal laws in nature and it also seems to work quite fine in economics and finance. In this paper we show that the power law explains extremely well the relationship between the value of broad-based market indices and their...

The paper explores utility measures by combining experiments with mathematical derivations in psychophysics paradigm. The analysis on ultimatum game experiment reveals an evidence for utility threshold and thus supports Bernoulli's utility logarithmic law. Both experimental results and...

In the physical sciences, order and disorder refer to the presence or absence of some symmetry or correlation in a many-particle system. It follows that it is important to examine whether there is any regularity hidden in the phase transition of the disorder-order relationship. In this paper a...

In this article we extend the agent-based model of firms' formation and growth proposed in [4]. In [4] the firms' creation, expansion or contraction results from the interaction of heterogeneous utility maximizers. While the original model was able to replicate the power law distribution in the...

Using a comprehensive international trade data set we investigate empirical regularities (known as Zipf’s Law or the rank-size rule) for the distribution of the interaction between countries as measured by revealed comparative advantage. Using the recently developed estimator by Gabaix and...

The size distribution and growth rates dynamics of U.S. manufacturing firms have been extensively studied by many authors. In this paper, using the COMPUSTAT database, we extend the analysis to disaggregated data, studying 15 industrial sectors. We find that among the stylized facts presented in...

Since the seminal work of Pareto, many empirical analyses suggested that the distribution of firms size is characterized by an asymptotic power like behavior. At the same time, recent investigations show that the distribution of annual growth rates of business firms displays a remarkable...

This paper builds on the work of Acemoglu et al. (2012) and considers a production network with unobserved common technological factor and establishes general conditions under which the network structure contributes to aggregate fluctuations. It introduces the notions of strongly and weakly...

This study demonstrates that the interactions of firm-level indivisible investments give rise to aggregate fluctuations without aggregate exogenous shocks. When investments are indivisible, aggregate capital is determined by the number of firms that invest. I develop a method to derive the...