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     COLLOQUIUM OF THE COMPUTATIONAL MATERIALS SCIENCE CENTER
       AND THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTATIONAL AND DATA SCIENCES
                         (CSI 898-Sec 001)
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                         Firm Dynamics

                          Rob Axtell
             Computational Social Science Program, 
         Department of Computational and Data Sciences 
             George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 

Up until quite recently the theory of the firm within economics was data 
poor. We knew little about the empirical structure of firms outside of 
narrow samples (e.g., manufacturing firms in some specific region, small 
start-up firms in some sector, or the < 10K firms that are publicly owned 
and traded). Today we have data on all 6 million firms that have employees 
and the other 24 million that do not have employees. Some 120 million people 
work for these businesses in the U.S. private sector. After reviewing the 
very peculiar data on firm sizes, ages, growth rates, job tenure, wages paid, 
and so on, I will go on to describe a parsimonious model in which 120 million 
software agents arrange themselves into 6 million groups having most of the 
properties of U.S. firms. Several model variations will be discussed. These 
data and models constitute the main content my new book, “Dynamics of Firms: 
Data, Theories, and Models,” due out from MIT Press next year.

                           September 14, 2015
                               4:30 pm
                    Exploratory Hall, room 3301 
                          Fairfax Campus

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 PM.
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Find the schedule at http://www.cmasc.gmu.edu/seminars.htm