Deregulation has stimulated much economic and political interest. This paper develops a framework for understanding the effects of deregulation from an ecological perspective and reports empirical studies of financial institutions (banks, thrifts and mutual funds) at two levels of analysis: the...

Geroski's discussion of organizational ecology from the point of view of an industrial economist is useful and illuminating. However, I believe that there are a few areas in which someone not familiar with the ecological literature might be misled. I therefore provide a slightly more detailed...

I construct theoretical models of the founding, failure, and growth of organizations that, when combined, constitute an explanation of the process by which the number of organizations in a population (the population density) declines from a peak, while at the same time the population mass (the...

In this paper, I study the early development of two organizational forms: credit unions and Morris Plan banks which, in the early twentieth century became socially acceptable money-lenders. Three forms of legitimacycognitive, moral, and pragmaticare important in understanding their evolution and...

I begin this paper by describing several methods that can be used to analyze count data. Starting with relatively familiar maximum likelihood methods-Poisson and negative binomial regression-I then introduce the less well known (and less well understood) quasi-likelihood approach. This method...

This article assesses the robustness of recent estimates of the effect of density on the founding rates in organizational populations. It reports reanalyses of data on founding rates of six populations of organizations using a generalization of quasi-likelihood estimation that allows...

This paper presents the authors' opinion on claims of Petersen and Koput (PK) regarding a problem in the usual interpretation of tests of the theory of density-dependent legitimation and competition as applied to rates of organizational mortality. PK argue that the negative first-order effect of...

For individual actors involved in economic activities (i.e. production, exchanges), conventions and structures represent two different types of opportunity or constraint. Conventions refer to values, rules and representations that influence economic behaviour. Structures refer to patterns of...