Are expansions and recessions more likely to end as their magnitude increases? In this paper we apply parametric hazard models to investigate this issue in a sample of 16 countries from 1881 to 2000. For the total sample we find evidence of positive magnitude dependence for recessions, while for...

Following the statistical mechanics methodology, firstly introduced in macroeconomics by Aoki [1996,2002], we provide some insights to the well known works of Greenwald and Stiglitz [1990, 1993]. Specifically, we reach analytically a closed form solution of their models overcoming the...

By employing exhaustive lists of large firms in European countries, we show that the upper-tail of the distribution of firm size can be fitted with a power-law (Pareto-Zipf law), and that in this region the growth rate of each firm is independent of the firm's size (Gibrat's law of proportionate...

We show that an economic system populated by multiple agents generates an equilibrium distribution in the form of multiple scaling laws of conditional PDFs, which are sufficient for characterizing the probability distribution. The existence of the double scaling law is demonstrated empirically...

Some agent-based models for growth and allocation of resources are described. The first class considered consists of conservative models, where the number of agents and the size of resources are constant during time evolution. The second class is made up of multiplicative noise models and some...

We consider the problem of the statistical uncertainty of the correlation matrix in the optimization of a financial portfolio. We show that the use of clustering algorithms can improve the reliability of the portfolio in terms of the ratio between predicted and realized risk. Bootstrap analysis...

We present an analysis of the credit market of Japan. The analysis is performed by investigating the bipartite network of banks and firms which is obtained by setting a link between a bank and a firm when a credit relationship is present in a given time window. In our investigation we focus on a...

We model a network economy with three sectors: downstream firms, upstream firms, and banks. Agents are linked by productive and credit relationships so that the behavior of one agent influences the behavior of the others through network connections. Credit interlinkages among agents are a source...

We introduce a new statistical test of the hypothesis that a balanced panel of firms have the same growth rate distribution or, more generally, that they share the same functional form of growth rate distribution. We applied the test to European Union and US publicly quoted manufacturing firms...