• Business cycles
• Endogenous growth model
• Evolutionary economics
• Innovation
• Neo-classical economics
• Schumpeter

This thesis presents a comparative analysis of the neo-classical and evolutionary theories of growth, both from a theoretical and an operational point of view. The focus of attention is the “Schumpeterian approach” to economic growth. Both perspectives, in fact, have invoked Schumpeter’ insights as major sources of inspiration. Given such common framework, they become closer and closer in terms of sources and mechanisms that drive growth, and some outcomes of their models result very similar. In short, it seems that a sort of convergence is taking place between the two perspectives. However, despite these similarities, the theoretical comparison, which is done looking at their major theoretical building blocks, has maintained the two perspectives separated one from the other, so that they are not converging to a common paradigm. More than this, it resulted that the theoretical foundations do not have a theoretical impact only, but also an operational one. That, in fact, reverberates in how, and how well, formal models can deliver “predictions” on major macroeconomic aggregates. The operational comparison is done looking at formal models’ ability to jointly replicate the major stylized facts concerning output and its main components. Although with some differences, both the neo-classical “Schumpeterian” and the “pure Schumpeterian” evolutionary models analysed, have brought unsatisfactory results. Both, in fact, are resulted not able to replicate the major empirical regularities concerning the variables of interest. In that, it can be argued that the Schumpeterian apparatus alone is not sufficient to fully account for the effects that the process of economic growth has on macroeconomic variables. An evolutionary agent-based model that bridges Schumpeterian innovation theory and Keynesian economic theory is analysed to clarify this point. The “Keynes-augmented” evolutionary model robustly generates many macroeconomic stylized facts, accounting for both short-run business cycle fluctuations and long-run growth dynamics.