The paper contradicts the thesis of Mancur Olson presented in `The Rise and Decline of Nations', using empirical evidence from studies on business interest associations and sectoral corporatism. We argue first that, unlike Olson assumes, selfish interest associations are not necessarily...

This paper contributes to the literature on both embodied technical progress and firm dynamics, by formulating an endogenous growth model where selection and imitation play a fundamental role in helping capital good producers to learn about the productivity of technologies embodied in new...

Digital goods are bit strings, sequences of 0s and 1s, that have economic value. They are distinguished from other goods by five characteristics: digital goods are non-rival, infinitely expansible, discrete, aspatial, and recombinant. The New Economy is one where the economics of digital goods...

An economy consists of many duopolistic markets. Firms must earn normal profits in the long run if they are to survive. Normal profits are interpreted as the long-run limit of average profits in the whole economy. We adopt the aspiration based model of firm behaviour, and link it to the economy...

This research advances an evolutionary growth theory that captures the pattern of life expectancy in the process of development, shedding new light on the sources of the remarkable rise in life expectancy since the Agricultural Revolution. The theory suggests that social, economic and...

When an agent chooses between prospects, noise in information processing generates an effect akin to the winner’s curse. Statistically unbiased perception systematically overvalues the chosen action because it fails to account for the possibility that noise is responsible for making the...