The practice of detecting power laws and scaling behaviors in economics and finance has gained momentum in the last few years, due to the increased use of concepts and methods first developed in statistical physics. Some disappointment has emerged in the economic profession, however, as regards...

We discuss a special Pólya lattice model to study cascading failures of firms in a simple industrial economy. In particular, every firm is represented by a Pólya-like urn, whose reinforcement is function of time, of the neighboring urns and their compositions, and of a random variable...

Power law behavior is an emerging property of many economic models. In this paper we emphasize the fact that power law distributions are persistent but not time invariant. In fact, the scale and shape of the firms' size distribution fluctuate over time. In particular, on a log–log space, both...

Our analysis, conducted using the GDP and the GDP deflator time series (OECD source; 1960–2001) for the G7 countries, shows the robustness of the negative covariance between the GDP and its deflator, but only over long run horizons. Through wavelet decomposition we evaluate the price–output...

We model an agent-based economy in which heterogeneous agents (firms and a bank) interact in the financial markets. The heterogeneity is due to the balance sheet conditions and to size. In our simulations, at the aggregate level, output displays changes in trend and volatility giving rise to...

In this paper, starting from Jaynes' MaxEnt methodology [10, 11], we follow the original idea of Aoki [1] to implement a canonical MaxEnt inference model for the replication of industrial firms' dynamics over a space of economic states. We develop an aggregate model to infer the distributions of...

This paper presents a stochastic dynamic model that can be used to describe situations in asset management where hedge funds may inadvertently find themselves running a Ponzi financing scheme. Greater transparency is necessary to reduce such opportunities, such as audited financials, and...