Inter-rm competition has received much attention in the theoreticalliterature, but recent empirical work suggests that the growth rates of ri-val rms are uncorrelated, and that rm growth can be taken as an essen-tially independent process. We begin by investigating the correlations of thegrowth...

Our empirical literature review shows that little is known about how firm performance changes withage, presumably because of the paucity of data on firm age. For Spanish manufacturing firms, weanalyse the firm performance related to firm age between 1998 and 2006. We find evidence thatfirms...

Local industrial clusters have attracted much attention in the recenteconomic and geographical literature. A huge number of case studies have beenconducted. This paper presents a meta-analysis of the case studies of 159 localindustrial clusters in various countries and industries. Based on an...

Necessity spin-offs are organized by employees of incumbent firms to escape deterioratingjob conditions. This paper proposes a conceptual model of the spin-off process. Necessityspin-offs are distinguished from opportunity spin-offs on the basis of their triggering events.An empirical analysis...

Few industries are more concentrated than the global fashion industry. We analyse thegeography and evolution of the ready-to-wear fashion design industry by looking at the yearlyentry rates following an organizational ecology approach. In contrast to earlier studies onmanufacturing industries,...

We apply a panel vector autoregression model to a firm-level longitudinal databaseto observe the co-evolution of sales growth, employment growth, profits growth andgrowth of R&D expenditure. Contrary to expectations, profit growth seems to havelittle detectable effect on R&D investment. Instead,...

A stochastic model of the evolution of the firm population in a regionand industry is developed. This model is used to make predictions about theexpected probability distribution of the firm number in regions and their dynamics.Data on the spatial distribution of firms in Germany is used to...

This paper studies the frequency of observing a certain number offirms or employees in a region for a given industry. Various predictions for thesefrequencies are deduced from theoretical considerations. Then, the empirical distri-butions of 198 industries in Germany are analysed. It is found...

We use new data on the location and background of entrants into the U.S. tireindustry to analyze the factors that caused the industry to be so regionally concentratedaround Akron, Ohio, a small city with no particular advantages for tire production. Weanalyze the states where firms entered and...

This essay argues that economic systems should be defined in terms of clusters ofcomplementary institutions. To show how such an approach can be carried out, I use acluster analysis technique and data on forty different economic institutions in OECDnations to isolate four quite different...