Structural change in basic industries is usually interpreted as an autonomous economic process. Some authors claim that there is a tendency to use the "end of the era of materials", thus resulting in a decline of the basic industries. Such a process would obviously benefit the environment....

Structural change in advanced industrialized countries has followed a very ambivalent course, with the resulting reductions in environmental stress in one area often being cancelled out by increases in another. What role has been played in this to date by industrial and economic policy? What...

Recent work drawing on data for large and small firms has shown a Pareto distribution of firm size. We mix a Gibrat-type growth process among incumbents with an exponential distribution of firm's age, to obtain the empirical Pareto distribution. -- Firm size distribution ; firm growth ; Gibrat's...

Serial correlation in annual growth rates carries a lot of information on growth processes it allows us to directly observe firm performance as well as to test theories. Using a 7-year balanced panel of 10 000 French manufacturing firms, we observe that small firms typically are subject to...

This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of different business strategies is conditional on the firm's 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...

We focus on four two-digit manufacturing industries that are known for their high patenting activity. We then use Principal Components Analysis to generate a firm- and year-specific 'innovativeness' index by extracting the common variance in a firm's patenting and R&D expenditure histories. To...