This paper investigates the microeconomics of employment dynamics, using a Chinese manufacturing firm-level dataset over the period 1998-2007. It does so in the light of a scheme of “circular and cumulative causation”, whereby firms’ heterogeneous productivity gains and sales dynamics, and...

Firms grow and decline by relatively lumpy jumps which cannot be accounted by the cumulation of small, "atom-less", independent shocks. Rather "big" episodes of expansion and contraction are relatively frequent. More technically, this is revealed by fat tail distributions of growth rates. This...

This work, which shall contribute to the Fest "A Just Society: Honouring Joseph Stiglitz", discusses a major unifying theme in Joe Stiglitz monumental work, namely, the analysis of economies characterised by persistent learning and coordination hurdles. In his analysis Joe is in many respects a...

The evolutionary taxonomy of financial systems, outlined by Dosi (1990), argued that market-based systems would be comparatively more engaged in the exploration of new technological paradigms, as an outcome of market selective pressure, whereas the more institutionalized finance allocation in...

"Learning-by-doing" is usually identified as a process whereby performance increases with experience in production. The paper investigates different patterns of "learning by doing", studying learning curves at product level. Cost-quantity relationships differ a lot across products belonging to...

In this work we shall attempt an excursus across fundamentally different streams of modern interpretations of the "primitive entities" constituting the social fabrics of economic systems. Behind each specific interpretative story, there is a set of ceteris paribus assumptions and also some...

In this work we discuss the main building blocks, achievements and challenges of an evolutionary interpretation of the relation between mechanisms of coordination and drivers of change in modern economies, seen as complex evolving systems. It is an evident stylised fact of modern economic...

We examine market selection mechanisms and their strength for a representative cohort of US new independent firms. In particular, we explore whether and how effectively markets reward newly-born firms according to their "fitness" in terms of both labour productivity and profitability. Our...

This work offers an overview of recent formalizations of organizational capabilities and learning. We first present the main characteristics both of NK models and of the approach based on Classifier Systems, focusing on their early applications to organization studies. We then discuss how the...

The patterns of innovation diffusion are well approximated by the logistic curves. This is the robust empirical fact confirmed by many studies in innovations dynamics. Here we show that the logistic pattern of innovation diffusion can be replicated by the time-dependent stochastic process with...