Recipes and Economic Growth: A Combinatorial March Down an Exponential Tail
证明，从标准薄尾分布中组合式抽取新想法也能产生指数增长，无需帕累托分布假设，并给出一个连接最大值、抽取次数与分布上尾形状的定理。
As Romer and Weitzman emphasized in the 1990s, new ideas are often combinations of existing ideas, an insight absent from recent models. In Kortum's research around the same time, ideas are draws from a probability distribution, and Pareto distributions play a crucial role. Why are combinations missing, and do we really need such strong distributional assumptions to get exponential growth? This paper demonstrates that combinatorially growing draws from standard thin-tailed distributions lead to exponential growth; Pareto is not required. More generally, it presents a theorem linking the max extreme value to the number of draws and the shape of the upper tail for probability distributions.