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...

Normative reasoning in welfare economics and social contract theory usually presumesinvariable, context-independent individual preferences. Following recent work particularlyin behavioral economics this assumption is difficult to defend. This paper therefore exploreswhat can be said about...

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,...

Amartya Sen has advanced a number of distinct arguments against utilitarianism and‘utility’-based views more generally. One of these invokes various ways in whichunderdogs can ‘adapt’ and learn to live with their situations. Sen’s argument is related toJon Elster’s discussion of...

In recent economic literature, there has been an increasing interest in modellingpreferences as endogenous. Some arguments go along the lines that institutions shapepreferences. This paper suggests that adopting a more substantive concept ofpreferences furthers our understanding of how they...

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...

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....