The theory of economic development was an exception to Paul Samuelson's claim of being a "generalist" in economics. It was a hard subject to tackle analytically because of the intrinsic difficulty of some of the concepts involved, such as increasing returns and long-term economic evolution....

Using the method of Caballero and Lyons (1990, 1992), I examine detailed Swedish manufacturing firm-level data on output and factor inputs from 1979 through 1994. Panel regressions show that an increase in aggregate output and inputs appears to raise individual firms production beyond private...