The paper proposes a model that explains cross-country growth divergences over time for different aspects of structural change. The model formalises the links between production technology, firm organisation (functional composition of employment) on the supply side and the endogenous evolution...

We aim at contributing to the debate on the mechanisms and properties of economic fluctuations. We consider a crucial aspect among many thought to influence this ubiquitous and extremely relevant phenomenon: the interaction structure that characterises the organisation of production, that is,...

The paper aims to analyse the effect of initial structural conditions in the organisation and composition of production and in demand patterns, via changes in wages distribution, as affecting economic growth and income inequality. We develop an evolutionary model with agent-based...

Vector Autoregressions (VARs) are a class of time series models commonly used in econometrics to study the dynamic effect of exogenous shocks to the economy. While the estimation of a VAR is straightforward, there is a problem of finding the transformation of the estimated model consistent with...

This paper addresses the problem of finding the appropriate method for conducting empirical validation in agent-based (AB) models, which is often regarded as the Achilles’ heel of the AB approach to economic modelling. The paper has two objectives. First, to identify key issues facing AB...

As people become richer they get the opportunity of consuming more but also qualitatively better goods. This holds for a basic commodity like food as well. We investigate food consumption in Russia, taking into account both expenditure and nutrition value in terms of calories. We analyze how...

In this paper a method to identify the causal structure associated with a VAR model is proposed. The structure is described by means of a graph, which provides a rigorous language to analyze the statistical and logical properties of causal relations. Under some general assumptions, causal...

By representing a system of budget shares as an approximate factor model we determine its rank, i.e. the number of common functional forms, or factors and we estimate a base of the factor space by means of approximate principal components. We assume that the extracted factors span the same space...

This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of different business strategies is conditional on the firms distance to the industry frontier. We use data on four 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the US over the period 1972-1999, and apply semi-parametric...

We relate innovation to sales growth for incumbent firms in four high-tech sectors. A firm, on average, experiences only modest growth and may grow for a number of reasons that may or may not be related to ‘innovativeness’. However, given that firms are heterogeneous and that growth rates...