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...

New knowledge with potential commercial value is created, replicated, and transferred in adistributed manner. The highly systemic nature of knowledge production and the need for anyknowledge to be individually acquired and expressed in order to produce an effect, jointlyconstrain the dynamics of...

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...

This paper builds on previous work within the conceptual framework of a generalizedDarwinism that clarifies such concepts as selection and replication. One of its aims is to refinethe concept of the interactor. An overview of the conditions under which group selection mayoccur helps us identify...

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,...

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 paper explores and explains the emergence and growth of new firms in the knowledgeeconomy. The resource-based view, capabilities approach, and evolutionary economics are usedas a foundation for a developmental approach. The development of the firm is conceptualized interms of processes that...

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...