Theory suggests that competition tends to equalize profit rates through the process of capital reallocation, and numerous studies have confirmed that profit rates are indeed persistent and mean-reverting. Recent empirical evidence further shows that fluctuations in the profitability of surviving...

We consider the current bipartite graph of German corporate boards and identify a small core of directors who are highly central in the entire network while being densely connected among themselves. To identify the core, we compare the actual number of board memberships to a random benchmark,...

Markov chains have experienced a surge of economic interest in the form of behavioral agent-based models that aim at explaining the statistical regularities of financial returns. We review some of the relevant mathematical facts and show how they apply to agent-based herding models, with the...

The cross-sectional variation in corporate profitability has occupied research across fields as diverse as strategic management, industrial organization, finance, and accounting. Prior work suggests that industry affiliation as well as different forms of corporate idiosyncrasies are important...

The question how the real and the financial side of a capitalist economy relate to each other has been a frequently recurring topic in the history of economic thought. Our paper addresses this question from the viewpoint that capital ultimately seeks returns from its perpetual reallocation and...

We express the idea of classical competition in a statistical equilibrium model, where the tendency for competition to equalize profit rates results in an exponential power (or Subbotin) distribution. The model supports and extends recent evidence on the Laplace distribution of growth rates in...

We derive microscopic foundations for a well-known probabilistic herding model in the agent-based finance literature. Lo and behold, the model is quite robust with respect to behavioral heterogeneity, yet structural heterogeneity, in the sense of an underlying network structure that describes...

We argue that the complex interactions of competitive heterogeneous firms lead to a statistical equilibrium distribution of firms' profit rates, which turns out to be an exponential power (or Subbotin) distribution. Moreover, we construct a diffusion process that has the Subbotin distribution as...