Peter Howitt won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The award was for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction. He and Philippe Aghion gave that theory a mathematical form in 1992.

Competition and innovation do not move together in a straight line. What decides the direction is where a firm sits relative to the technological frontier. Peter also draws the line between a merger that buys innovation and one that removes it, and he describes the route by which an incumbent turns market power into political power. We then turn to agent-based modeling. He is candid about why a method he still defends took thirty years to find readers.

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References:

"A Model of Growth Through Creative Destruction" (with Aghion), Econometrica 60(2), March 1992, 323–351. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2951599.
Endogenous Growth Theory (with Aghion), MIT Press, 1998. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262528467/endogenous-growth-theory/
"Competition and Innovation: An Inverted-U Relationship" (with Aghion, Bloom, Blundell, Griffith), Quarterly Journal of Economics 120(2), May 2005, 701–728. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/120/2/701/1933966.
"The Effects of Entry on Incumbent Innovation and Productivity" (with Aghion, Blundell, Griffith, Prantl), Review of Economics and Statistics 91(1), February 2009, 20–32. https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article/91/1/20/57753/The-Effects-of-Entry-on-Incumbent-Innovation-and.
"The Emergence of Economic Organization" (with Robert Clower), Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 41(1), January 2000, 55–84. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268199000876.
"Banks, Market Organization, and Macroeconomic Performance: An Agent-Based Computational Analysis" (with Ashraf and Gershman), JEBO 135, March 2017, 143–180. DOI 10.1016/j.jebo.2016.12.023.
"How Inflation Affects Macroeconomic Performance: An Agent-Based Computational Investigation" (with Ashraf and Gershman), Macroeconomic Dynamics 20(2), March 2016, 558–581. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/macroeconomic-dynamics/article/abs/how-inflation-affects-macroeconomic-performance-an-agentbased-computational-investigation/DC3AF3CA750F82FDE20164B36935FA1F.
"Getting at Systemic Risk via an Agent-Based Model of the Housing Market" (with Geanakoplos, Axtell, Farmer and others), American Economic Review 102(3), May 2012, 53–58. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.102.3.53.