Both theoretical and applied economics have a great deal to say about many aspects of the firm, but the literature on the extinctions, or demises, of firms is very sparse. We use a publicly available data base covering some 6 million firms in the US and show that the underlying statistical...

In the social sciences, there is increasing evidence of the existence of power law distributions. The distribution of recessions in capitalist economies has recently been shown to follow such a distribution. The preferred explanation for this is self-organised criticality. Gene Stanley and...

There is empirical evidence from a range of disciplines that as the connectivity of a network increases, we observe an increase in the average fitness of the system. But at the same time, there is an increase in the proportion of failure/extinction events which are extremely large. The...

This paper highlights the difficulties that policy-makers face when trying to predict economic activity.

In the English county of Cornwall the annual invading army of tourists which are its biggest source of income are referred to unkindly as ‘emmets’, an ancient word for ‘ants’. Yet the observed behaviour of real life ants suggests that the locals have instinctively hit on a model which...