Long waves and ‘evolutionary chaos’ in a simple Schumpeterian model of embodied technical change

Long Waves: Conceptual, Empirical and Modelling Issues

“…Moreover, the very apparent time trend must also be taken into account, which will seriously affect all of the longer data series. Finally, the procedure of decomposing the time series into subperiods (usually based on some dating of long waves with a lag) also employed by Kleinknecht and Solomou further invalidates their work since it may implicitly be selecting for random periods of above and below-average activity, as Silverberg and Lehnert (1993) argue. An alternative is represented by the nonparametric Poisson tests proposed by the latter authors, who show that an exponential time trend of the Poisson arrival rate is highly significant, with a growth rate of between ½ and 1% p.a., depending on the series.…”

“…Quite aside from such specific factors as the oil crisis, Silverberg and Lehnert (1993) show that the contemporaneous cross-correlation between a (trailing) measure of innovative activity and aggregate productivity growth is essentially zero, even though the former is an excellent predictor of the latter, but only after a time interval of 20-30 years. And causality, at least in their model, is exclusively from innovation to macroeconomics, and not vice versa.…”

The Footprint of Evolutionary Processes of Learning and Selection Upon the Statistical Properties of Industrial Dynamics

“…The aggregate regularities emerge as the result of the continuum coupling of change and coordination. Models like the ones proposed in Nelson and Winter (1982), Silverberg and Lehnert (1993), Dosi et al (1995), Dosi et al (2000a), Bottazzi et al (2001) and Winter et al (2003) are somewhat different and complementary examples of the evolutionary-modelling approach. Evolutionary models that address the pattern of industry evolution, with particular reference to the learning and selection process, can be subdivided into three different categories: [i] the group of models that focus on the selection process (see Metcalfe (1998) for an extensive discussion);…”

Evolutionary modelling of the macro-economic impacts of catastrophic flood events

“…Iwai, 1984a,b;Silverberg and Lehnert, 1993;Verspagen, 1994a,b, 1995) or new technologies emerging from variations and recombinations of existing technological options (Weitzman 1998;Olson and Frey 2002;Tsur and Zemel 2006;van den Bergh 2008). These approaches deserve more attention in existing macroeconomic models aiming to simulate or predict the wider macro-economic consequences of large scale catastrophes like floods.…”