The paper aims to account for the empirical stylised facts re-lated to changes in sectoral structures that have led to the growthof services in most advanced countries over recent decades. A growthmodel with evolutionary micro{founded structural change is devel-oped, which formalises the role of...

This paper builds on previous work within the conceptual framework of a generalizedDarwinism that clarifies such concepts as selection and replication. One of its aims is to refinethe concept of the interactor. An overview of the conditions under which group selection mayoccur helps us identify...

We attempt to describe the coevolution of employment growth, sales growth andgrowth of profits in a panel of French manufacturing firms 1996-2004. Our analysisentails ‘recursive’ panel vector autoregressions, whereby we impose the structure of employmentgrowth leading to contemporaneous...

Few industries are more concentrated than the global fashion industry. We analyse thegeography and evolution of the ready-to-wear fashion design industry by looking at the yearlyentry rates following an organizational ecology approach. In contrast to earlier studies onmanufacturing industries,...

This paper incorporates aspects of humans’ evolved cognition into a formal model of culturalevolution and scrutinizes their interactions with population-level processes. It is shown how thebiased transmission of different kinds of behavior via cultural learning processes influencesagents’...

This paper is a follow-up on two earlier debates I was part of. One debate is documentedin a special issue of The Journal of Economic Methodology, edited by Matthias Klaes andcalled Symposium: Ontological Issues in Evolutionary Economics (2004) The other oneis reported in a special issue of The...

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,...

Recent advances in the economics of knowledge highlight the key role ofpecuniary knowledge externalities in explaining the system dynamics oftotal factor productivity growth. When non-exhaustible technologicalknowledge is an input both in the production of new goods and of furtherknowledge, and...

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...

The emergence of novelty is a driving agent for economic change. New technologies, new productsand services, new institutional arrangements, to mention a few examples, are the backbone ofdevelopment and growth. Important though it is, the emergence of novelty is not well understood.What seems to...