Drawing from a commercial database seldom used by economists, this note provides aggregate statistics for four dimensions of the worldwide explosion of industrial mergers: the overall volume, the median and average size of mergers, sectoral composition of mergers, and the countries where these...

This essay provides evidence that the invention of agriculture was not a dramatic technological advance in the history of humankind and that agriculture was quite consistent with nomadic hunting and gathering. The available clues also suggests that exact origins of agriculture do not seem...