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The impact of capital accumulation on job creation is an important and interesting issue in economic development. This model provides a general‐equilibrium framework for studying technology choice with unemployment in a developing economy based on micro‐foundations. Unemployment in the urban sector results from the existence of efficiency wages. Manufacturing firms engage in oligopolistic competition and choose technologies to maximise profits. A more advanced technology uses more capital and less labour. In the steady state, an increase in the amount of capital induces firms to choose more advanced technologies and the wage rate increases. While a higher capital stock always induces firms to choose more advanced technologies, urban unemployment rate may decrease and agricultural sector employment may increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A country's unemployment rate can be affected by technology choice and the opening of international trade. This general equilibrium model examines the impact of international trade with the presence of dual labor markets in which manufacturing firms engage in oligopolistic competition and choose technologies with different marginal and fixed costs to maximize profits. In a closed economy, it is shown that an increase in labor market efficiency or a population increase induces manufacturing firms to adopt more advanced technologies and the wage rate in the manufacturing sector increases. With the existence of a continuum of technologies, technology choice is not a source of firm heterogeneity. The opening of international trade leads to an increase in the wage rate in the manufacturing sector and the price of the agricultural good. When countries are identical, international trade always increases national welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw on insights from economic theory on urban growth, large shocks and spatial dynamics to assess COVID‐19 flow‐on effects and potential disruptive legacy in urban‐regional dynamics. Urban dynamics in Australia are assessed at national, regional and intra‐urban scales. Long‐term and short‐term urban dynamics are analysed against random growth, locational fundamentals and increasing returns theories of urban growth and adjustment. A focus in Australia and elsewhere is the potential effect of COVID‐19 on where people want to live, enabled in part by technological connectivity that releases some workers from proximity to work constraints when choosing a home. Our results suggest that urbanisation trends and adjustments to shocks differ for capital cities and noncapital cities. At the inter‐regional migration level, Australia's largest urban system, Sydney, is characterised by a cointegration relationship between outmigration and Sydney property prices relative to other housing markets. At finer spatial scales, COVID‐19 had a negative impact on house prices within Sydney and may, for some micro‐geographies and/or towns and regional centres, lead to significant change. However, typically this effect on houses (not units) began to dissipate in the period June‐November 2020, when also controlling for housing policy pre‐ and post‐COVID‐19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on sustainable development has largely focused on investigating the relationship between companies' environmental and economic performance. However, many aspects remain unexplored, and empirical studies are far from reaching a consensus due to the heterogeneity of the environmental and economic measures and methodologies used. This study contributes to the literature on sustainable development by considering a panel of 998 US companies observed over the period 2003–2017 using both traditional panel data methods and an unconditional quantile regression technique. The empirical evidence confirms that environmental performance, measured in terms of environmental orientation and environmental innovation, positively affects returns on assets and equity. It also demonstrates that these returns change across quantiles and depend on the capacity of green companies to generate the same streams of income as nongreen companies but with less capital. In other words, green firms tend to be more efficient in generating future wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so‐called "new growth theory" is characterized by the now Nobel Prize winning insight that ideas are a nonrival input to and output from endogenous investment in innovation. Nonrivalry implies increasing returns to scale, but this also unintentionally creates an empirically disputed scale effect that a growing population implies an ever‐increasing growth rate. Empirical evidence supports fully‐endogenous growth without scale effects, but theoretical issues sustain the decades‐long dispute over exactly how to negate the scale effect. This article surveys theoretical approaches to resolving the scale effect and shows how four generations of endogenous growth theory are defined by the maturing of modeling techniques for constraining increasing returns. The synthesis suggests that the dispute over scale effects is really a narrative about how the powerful application of increasing returns has followed a standard theoretical development pattern. This implies that a fourth generation is now emerging that negates the scale effect while retaining fully‐endogenous growth without relying on assumptions of linearity. Instead, the market response to excessive increasing returns to innovation constrains explosive growth by expanding the market, rather than by a linear assumption. This latest class of endogenous growth models may be the final chapter to resolving the long‐running dispute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How resource abundance and market size affect the choice of increasing returns technologies is studied in an overlapping‐generations general equilibrium model in which manufacturing firms engage in oligopolistic competition. The model is surprisingly tractable. First, for the steady state, the wage rate, the level of technology, and capital stock are not affected by the amount of natural resources. An increase in the share of agricultural revenue going to natural resources leads to a lower wage rate and firms choose less advanced technologies. Second, an increase in market size increases the equilibrium wage rate, level of technology, and capital stock. Finally, other things equal, a country with a lower endowment of natural resources or a higher market size has a comparative advantage in producing the manufactured good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities exist because of the productivity gains that arise from clustering production and workers, a process called agglomeration. How important is agglomeration for aggregate growth? This paper constructs a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to estimate the effect of local agglomeration on aggregate growth. We combine aggregate time-series and city-level panel data to estimate the model's parameters via generalized method of moments. The estimates imply a statistically and economically significant impact of local agglomeration on the growth rate of per capita consumption, raising it by about 10%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends the traditional Pólya scheme consisting of one urn with two colors to the schemes where multiple independent and/or interdependent urns with multiple additions and/or withdraws and several independent and/or interdependent colors are considered. It also argues that with these schemes many complex economic systems subject to increasing returns can be formalized mathematically, for they allow for positive and negative feedbacks among many variables, 'jumps,' 'bad' behaved dynamics, dis continuities, and interrelation among systems. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 19: 21-37, 2013 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from Fortune Magazine's 500 American largest corporations from 1955 to 2010, this article shows that firm sizes at national and industrial level are highly skew but not Zipf-distributed. It also argues that, while self-organizing industrial structures of this kind are due to increasing returns and hard to describe with conventional theories, system dynamics and urn theory are equipped with adequate tools to analyze them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper broadens the scope of environmental management system (EMS) research by describing how EMSs can contribute to inertia in present production systems. In conjunction with other factors this inertia can inhibit dramatic shifts toward more sustainable technologies and systems. Our approach builds upon technological lock-in theory, which focuses on market coordination and technological interdependencies as generators of inertia in technological systems. Building on this framework, we call attention to previously under appreciated non-market social forces and institutional structures that can further reinforce lock-in. We argue that the co-evolutionary mechanisms that generate increasing returns for physical technologies may also be applied to social technologies, such as management systems. The paper describes the emergence of ‘EMS lock-in’ as a path dependent evolution occurring within the context of the larger quality management paradigm. While EMS may initially produce improvements in environmental performance, EMS may also constrain organizational focus to the exploitation of present production systems, rather than exploring for superior innovations that are discontinuous. The paper questions the enthusiastic private and public sector support for EMS implementation and instead recommends an ambidextrous management approach that integrates foresight and broader stakeholder collaboration. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1. We examined positive associations and trade-offs of maternal and reproductive traits in a population of Columbian ground squirrels, Spermophilus columbianus. 2. Structural size, body condition, mother’s personal allocation to body mass during reproduction, and timing of littering were estimated for live-trapped reproductive females that were observed during an 8-year period, and were compared to litter mass, litter size, and average pup mass using path analyses. 3. Mothers exhibited age-structured traits that influenced reproductive patterns. Yearling mothers were significantly smaller, bred later, and had smaller litters than older females. Mothers that gained more body mass during reproduction and older mothers in good body condition that were structurally large had larger litters. 4. Early seasonal timing of littering was an important positive influence on successful reproduction by older mothers only in early breeding seasons and in years when conditions for reproduction were good for all females. 5. The number of offspring that survived to 1 year of age was most strongly associated with litter mass and litter size; date of breeding was of secondary influence, with earlier litters exhibiting greater success. 6. In general, mothers that gained the most in body mass during reproduction were concurrently more successful in weaning large litters (perhaps due to better quality of foraging habitat). 7. In addition to expected reproductive trade-offs, reproduction by Columbian ground squirrels exhibited positive associations of life-history traits that may reflect evolutionary increasing returns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]