The basic philosophy behind Gibrat's rule of proportionate effect has been to find some common mechanism in the growth process of business firms, based on the idea that growth rates are independent of size and drawn from the same distribution. After decades of research, however, it seems fair to...

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...

[Introduction] The idea that a price system based on competitive markets is able to aggregate different pieces of information dispersed in the economy dates back to the 50’s. In particular, economists have long understood that, in theory, the prices in properly designed asset markets reflect...

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,...

Power law behavior has been recognized to be a pervasive feature of many phenomena in natural and social sciences. While immense research efforts have been devoted to the analysis of behavioural mechanisms responsible for the ubiquity of power-law scaling, the strong theoretical foundation of...

A growing body of recent literature allows for heterogenous trading strategies and limited rationality of agents in behavioral models of financial markets. More and more, this literature has been concerned with the explanation of some of the stylized facts of financial markets. It now seems that...

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...

In this review we discuss advances in the agent-based modeling of economic and social systems. We show the state of the art of the heuristic design of agents and how behavioral economics and laboratory experiments have improved the modeling of agent behavior. We further discuss how economic...