Equilibrium Imitation and Growth
研究发现，生产率最低的企业通过模仿更高效企业来推动技术扩散，从而促进经济增长；模型表明生产率分布尾部越厚，增长率越高。
The least productive agents in an economy can be vital in generating growth by spurring technology diffusion. We develop an analytically tractable model in which growth is created as a positive externality from risk taking by firms at the bottom of the productivity distribution imitating more productive firms. Heterogeneous firms choose to produce or pay a cost and search within the economy to upgrade their technology. Sustained growth comes from the feedback between the endogenously determined distribution of productivity, as evolved from past search decisions, and an optimal, forward-looking search policy. The growth rate depends on characteristics of the productivity distribution, with a thicker-tailed distribution leading to more growth.