Recently evolutionary economists started to pay attention to ontological issues in theirown subfield. Two projects dominate the discussions: Generalized Darwinism(henceforth: GD), promoted by Geoff Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen, and theContinuity Hypothesis (henceforth: CH), put forward by...

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...

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,...

The paper unravels the subversive nature of Schumpeter’s proposition that entrepreneurscarry out innovations (the micro level), that swarms of followers imitate them (meso) andthat, as a consequence, ‘creative destruction’ leads to economic development ‘fromwithin’ (macro). It is...

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...

During its early and formative years, the U.S. tire industry was heavily concentratedaround Akron, Ohio. We test the extent to which entrants in Ohio were attracted to theAkron area by agglomeration benefits, contributing to a self-reinforcing processenvisioned in many modern theories of...

According to the advocates of a “Generalized Darwinism” (GD), the three coreDarwinian principles of variation, selection and retention (or inheritance) can be used as ageneral framework for the development of theories explaining evolutionary processes inthe socioeconomic domain. Even though...

Empirical work on micro and small firms has focused on developed countries.The little work that exists on developing countries is all too often based on smallsamples taken from ad hoc questionnaires. The census data we analyze are fairlyrepresentative of the structure of small business in India....

Agents interacting on a body of water choose between technologiesto catch …sh. One is harmless to the resource, as it allows full recovery;the other yields high immediate catches, but low(er) future catches.Strategic interaction in one ‘objective’resource game may induceseveral ‘subjective’...

Strong growth in disposable income has driven, and is still driving, consumption to unprecedented,but not sustainable levels. To explain the dynamic interplay of needs, need satisfaction, andinnovation underlying that growth a behavioral theory of consumption is suggested and discussedwith...