The macroeconomic experience of the last decade stressed the importance of jointly studying the growth and business cycle fluctuations behavior of the economy. To analyze this issue, we embed a model of Schumpeterian growth into an estimated medium-scale DSGE model. Results from a Bayesian estimation suggest that investment risk premia are a key driver of the slump following the Great Recession. Endogenous innovation dynamics amplifies financial crises and helps explain the slow recovery. Moreover, financial conditions also account for a substantial share of R&D investment dynamics.
This paper compares domestically and foreign-owned plants with respect to their debt-to-assets ratio and analyzes to which extent the difference is systematically affected by corporate taxation. To derive hypotheses about influence of corporate taxation on a firm's debt financing we adapt a standard model of taxation and financing decisions of firms for the case of international debt shifting activities of foreign-owned firms. We estimate the average difference between a foreign-owned and a domestically owned firm's debt ratio, treating the mode of ownership as endogenous. Using data from 32,067 European firms, we find that foreign-owned firms on average exhibit a significantly higher debt ratio than their domestically owned counterparts in the host country. Moreover, this gap in the debt ratio increases with the host country's statutory corporate tax rate.
The renaissance in evolutionary economics in the past two decades has brought with it a great deal of theoretical development and interdisciplinary import. Much of this has been useful, but not all of it has been commensurate. In this paper, we make the case for the limits to theoretical developments that lack clearly specified ontological commitments by attempting an inductive synthesis of the ontological content of empirical generalizations in evolutionary economics. We call this ‘evolutionary realism' and present it in three axioms - (1) all existences are bimodal matter?energy actualizations of ideas, (2) all existences associate, and (3) all existences are processes. We conclude with discussion of the sort of analytical framework that we might consistently build on these axioms; a three?level analytical structure of micro, meso and macro domains.
Building on the ontology of evolutionary realism recently proposed by Dopfer and Potts (forthcoming), we develop an analytical framework for evolutionary economics with a micro-meso-macro architecture. The motive for reconception is to make clear the highly complex and emergent nature of existence and change in economic evolution. For us, the central insight is that an economic system is a population of rules, a structure of rules, and a process of rules. The economic system is a rule-system contained in what we call the meso. From the evolutionary perspective, one cannot directly sum micro into macro. Instead, we conceive of an economic system as a set of meso units, where each meso consists of a rule and its population of actualizations. The proper analytical structure of evolutionary economics is in terms of micro-meso-macro. Micro refers to the individual carriers of rules and the systems they organize, and macro consists of the population structure of systems of meso. Micro structure is between the elements of the meso, and macro structure is between meso elements. The upshot is an ontologically coherent framework for analysis of economic evolution as change in the meso domain - in the form of what we call a meso trajectory - and a way of understanding the micro-processes and macro-consequences involved. We believe that the micro-meso-macro analytical framework can greatly enhance the focus, clarity, and, ultimately, power, of evolutionary economic theory.
The paper discusses the micro foundations of evolutionary economics, introducing a unified concept of the economic agent as a rule maker and rule user. Based on recent findings of the neuronal, cognitive and behavioral sciences, Homo Sapiens Oeconomicus emerges as an alternative to Homo Oeconomicus. A taxonomy of rules distinguishing between cognitive, behavioral and blueprint rules and a set of theoretical propositions related to the structure and evolution of those rules are suggested.
