A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent con-sumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarceempirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African householddata and nds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively moreon visible...

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...

There is currently much hope about environmental innovation and green technologies, notablyas a response to the threat of climate change. This paper offers a critical perspective on the roleof technological innovation to solving environmental problems, based on considering empiricaleconomic...

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...

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,...

This paper shows how sustainable consumption patterns can spread within a population viaprocesses of social learning even though a strong individual learning bias may favorenvironmentally harmful products. We present a model depicting how the biased transmission ofdifferent behaviors via...

Until a few generations ago, humans made their living by foraging, like other animals.We have therefore inherited genes that allowed our ancestors to thrive as hunters andgatherers. Thriving in a modern economy requires very different behaviours but wecope because the human brain evolved to be...