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...

There are two key stylised facts about the extinction patterns of firms. First, the probability of extinction is highest at the start of the firm"s existence, but soon becomes more or less invariant to the age of the firm. Second, the relationship between the size and frequency of firm...

We observe a marked increase in the spatial homogeneity of the popularity of first names across the United States in recent decades. We explain this by calibrating a modified standard model of neutral cultural evolution to the record of first name popularities for the United States as a whole...