In this chapter, we outline the reasons why economics has been concerned with non-linear dynamics, with a particular focus on business cycles and on economic growth. Using varying perspectives, we discuss the salient historical mathematical approaches to the problem and the results that were...

In this chapter, we describe growth and cycles in economics as a struggle between capitalists and workers. We first present the Phillips curve (which statistically relates unemployment with the rate of change of nominal wages) and then the Goodwin model. The latter reinterprets, in economical...

After having illustrated in Chap. 13 the Harrod’s model and a chaotic specification of it, in this Chapter we are going to prove that (1) real data could be obtained by a suitable calibration of model’s parameters, (2) the calibrated model confirms theoretical predictions (Orlando and Della...

The economic impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is studied using a (semi) endogenous growth model with two novel features. First, the task approach from labor economics is reformulated and integrated into a growth model. Second, the standard represen- tative household assumption is rejected,...

In most industrialized countries, employment has grown predominately in jobs at the upper and lower tails of the wage distribution, while employment in the middle part of the distribution has stagnated or declined. This process of job polarization is well documented for a number of countries. We...

The productivity generated by capital goods is not uniform along the time. When there exist conventional physical capital goods the productivity obtained is minor that the one generated by quality capital goods. To obtain a correct measure of growth in presence of this embodied technical...

This survey reviews the literature on firm dynamics, innovation and growth aiming to better understand the main channels through which innovation affects the performance of modern economies. Since innovations fundamentally diffuse through a complex process of firm and product creation and...

One of the key issues in economics is the explanation of unemployment and its variation across different economies. Doing so, modern mainstream macroeconomics refers to the effects of financial crises and to institutional structures and their variation across countries. However, unemployment...