This article explores the dynamics of market selection by investigating of the relationships linking productivity, profitability, investment and growth, based on China's manufacturing firm-level dataset over the period 1998 - 2007. First, we find that productivity variations, rather than...

The role played in the last decades by contract research organizations (CROs) has been almost completely neglected by the economic and managerial literature. At most they are presented as firms performing routine clinical tasks, a portrait which is largely outdated and misleading. Thus the main...

The ambiguity of the empirical results on the relationship between copyright and creativity calls for a better theoretical understanding of the issue, possibly enlarging the analysis to other factors such as technology and copyright enforcement. This paper addresses these complex policy issues...

The role of the patent system in the pharmaceutical sector is highly debated also due to its strong public health implications. In this paper we develop an evolutionary, agent-based model of the pharmaceutical industry to explore the impact of different configurations of the patent system upon...

Firm growth is an essential feature of market economies, shaping together macroeconomic performance and the evolution of industry structures. As a potential indicator of organizational "fitness" within a competitive environment, firm growth is also a central concern to both the practice and...

We provide a survey of the main mechanisms of market selection used in economics. We gather them in three theoretical paradigms (rational equilibrium, Simonesque and evolutionary), that we try to reconcile in terms of underlying laws of selection. We show that the three paradigms have been...

This paper presents a broad set of empirical regularities about selection and market shares reallocation in manufacturing industries of France, Germany, UK and USA. We first disentangle the contribution to industry-level productivity growth of within-firm productivity changes and between-firms...

Diverse theories of industry dynamics predict heterogeneity in production efficiency to be the driver of firms' growth, survival and industrial change, either through a direct link between efficiency and growth, or through an indirect effect via profitabilities, as more productive firms can...

The paper is based on the acknowledgement that properties of markets stemming from features of demand are too frequently overlooked in the economic literature, and a re-balancing is necessary to properly account for theoretical and empirical phenomena. We sustain that one of the most relevant...

Understanding whether technical change is beneficial or detrimental for employment is at the center of the policy debate, especially in phases of economic recession. So far, the effects of innovation - in its manifold declinations and intrinsic complexity - on labour demand have proven to be not...