Although employment at individual firms tends to be highly nonstationary, the employment size distribution of all firms in the United States appears to be stationary. It closely resembles a Pareto distribution. There is a lot of entry and exit, mostly of small firms. This review surveys general...

The Internet has the potential to significantly reduce search costs by allowing consumers to engage in low-cost price comparisons online. This paper provides empirical evidence on the impact that the rise of Internet comparison shopping sites has had for the prices of life insurance in the...

Les PME contribuent fortement à l’amélioration de la compétitivité, du dynamisme de l’innovation et de la croissance d’une économie ; cette revue de la littérature met en perspective les déterminants de leur développement et de leur cycle de vie.

Over the past decades, private R&D spending in the US and other developed countries has been growing faster than GDP. At the same time, the growth rates of per capita and aggregate output have been rather stable, possibly declining slightly. This paper proposes a growth model that can account...

In this paper we show that bank competition has an intrinsically ambiguous impact on capital accumulation. We further show that it is also responsible for the emergence of development traps in economies that otherwise would be characterized by unique equilibria. These results explain the...

Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near...

Over the past decades, private R&D spending in the US and other developed countries has been growing faster than GDP. In the United States, for example, R&D expenditures (excluding those funded by the federal government) have grown from 0.63% of GDP in 1953 to 1.95% of GDP in 2007, i.e. R&D...

The term ‘enterprise search’ (ES) refers to the information retrieval applications that use a range of different core technologies to search enterprise repositories. It includes the search of the organisation’s external web site, intranets and other electronic text held by the organisation...

Since the 1980s, the labour demand has shifted toward more educated workers in the US. The most common explanation is that the productivity of skilled workers has risen relative to the unskilled, but it is not easy to explain why the aggregate labour productivity was stagnant during the 1980s....