A surprisingly neglected facet of sector evolution is the evolutionary analysis of firms', and thus a sector's, scope. Defining a sector as a group of firms that can change their scope over time, we study the transformation of U.S. banking firms. We undertake a sectoral, population-wide study of...

Economies of scale in data aggregation is a widely accepted concept. It refers to improved prediction accuracy when the number of observations on variables in a dataset increases. By contrast, economies of scope in data is more ambiguous. The classic economic interpretation refers to cost...

Throughout the industrialized world, macroeconomic performance since the mid-1970s has been very poor, and the prospects in the near term remain bleak. While there is no consensus among macroeconomists regarding the diagnosis (or cure) of these ills, the major competing schools of thought have...

Julian Simon famously argued that economic growth is correlated with population growth. The basis for this correlation is what Simon refers to as the “ultimate resource,” namely the human mind and the collective stock of dispersed, tacit, and inarticulate knowledge among individuals. Though...

The paper examines the determinants of the division of labor within firms. It provides an explanation of the pervasive observed changes in work organization away from the traditional functional departments and towards multi-tasking and job rotation. Whereas the existing literature on the...

We assess size and scope-related economies in the global advertising and marketing services business. A translog cost function is employed wherein a firm's costs vary according to its scale and two dimensions of the scope of its operations. Parameters of the model are estimated via three stage...

We apply and extend the cost-based approach to bundling and tying under competition developed in Evans and Salinger (2004a) to over-the-counter pain relievers and cold medicines. We document that consumers pay much less for tablets with multiple ingredients than they would to buy tablets with...

This paper estimates economies of scale and scope for 200 large Australian superannuation (pension) funds in 2009 using a multiple-output cost function. This is the first and currently only year that certain fund-level information provided in the superannuation annual returns to the Australian...

What accounts for the diversity and limited concentration that has long characterized the organization of the advertising agency industry? This question is addressed by treating an advertising agency as a multiproduct firm. The firm's product line or service mix is defined in terms of the set of...