Interfirm heterogeneity: nature, sources and consequences for industrial dynamics. An introduction

Giovanni Dosi, Sebastien Lechevalier and Angelo Secchi

Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL

Abstract: Contemporary economic analysis is largely subject to rather bizarre schizofrenic syndromes. On the one hand, over the last thirty years or so, macro theories have tried to squeeze the interpretation of whatever aggregate dynamics down to some sort of decision-theoretic framework in which the increasingly mythical ''representative agent'' was doing all the action. Whatever statistical properties of the time-series, being it productivity and GDP growth, fluctuations, employment, investment, had to be explained as the equilibrium outcome of some sophisticated inter-temporal maximization exercise by such an agent. Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models are the dominant genre in this spirit. On the micro side largely the opposite has happened. Empirical analyses drawing upon an increasing ensemble of micro longitudinal datasets have powerfully highlighted the ubiquitous, large and persistent heterogeneity in all dimensions of business firms' characteristics and dynamics one cared to look at.

Date: 2010
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00642680v1
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Published in Industrial and Corporate Change, 2010, 19, pp.1867

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Working Paper: Interfirm heterogeneity: nature, sources and consequences for industrial dynamics. An introduction (2010)
Working Paper: Interfirm heterogeneity: nature, sources and consequences for industrial dynamics. An introduction (2010)
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