In the past several decades, the U.S. economy has witnessed a number of striking trends that indicate a rising market concentration and a slowdown in business dynamism. In this paper, we make an attempt to understand potential common forces behind these empirical regularities through the lens of...

In this paper we replicate most of the stylized facts characterizing the decline in business dynamism in the USA highlighted by Akcigit and Ates (2021) and provide an explanation of their emergence by means of a macroeconomic agent-based model populated by two types of firms: innovators who...

In this paper we replicate most of the stylized facts characterizing the decline in business dynamism in the USA highlighted by Akcigit and Ates (2021) and provide an explanation of their emergence by means of a macroeconomic agent-based model populated by two types of firms: innovators who...

Researchers have used patent counts, citation weighted patent counts, as well as research and development spending to measure innovation with, at times, conflicting results. We benchmark the validity of these innovation proxies using a novel data set of appraised tangible and intangible assets....

In “Culture: the Anthropologist's Account” (1999) Adam Kuper advised avoidance of the use of the word ‘culture' at all. It has come to denote too much and has now come to mean too little. However, just as “the history of all cultures is the history of cultural borrowing” (Edward Said,...

Abstract – In this article we describe the trials and tribulations in the early stages to introduce cashless retail payments in the USA. We compare efforts by financial service firms and retailers. We then document the ephemeral life of one of these innovations, colloquially known as “Hinky...

The in persona Christi Capitis doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church guarantees the validity of its sacraments, irrespective of the morality of the priest who performs them. While this protects their value as metacredence goods, it seemingly opens the door to opportunistic behavior by the...

In "The Problem of Social Cost" Ronald Coase was highly critical of the work of Cambridge University Economics Professor Arthur Cecil Pigou, presenting him as a radical government interventionist. In later work Coase's critique of Pigou became even more strident. In fact, however, Pigou's...

In spite of its title, in the midst of his numerous achievements, Darwin's book was unable to "solve" the problem of "speciation" that is the problem of the origin of species. We survey the modern biological literature and we argue that it has shown that the laws of structure and change that...

In spite of its title, in the midst of his numerous achievements, Darwin's book was unable to "solve" the problem of "speciation" that is the problem of the origin of species. We survey the modern biological literature and we argue that it has shown that the laws of structure and change that...