Financial markets (share markets, foreign exchange markets and others) are all characterized by a number of universal power laws. The most prominent example is the ubiquitous finding of a robust, approximately cubic power law characterizing the distribution of large returns. A similarly robust...

Multifractal processes have recently been proposed as a new formalism for modelling the time series of returns in finance. The major attraction of these processes is their ability to generate various degrees of long memory in different powers of returns - a feature that has been found in...

Multi-fractal processes have recently been proposed as a new formalism for modelling the time series of returns in finance. The major attraction of these processes is their ability to generate various degrees of long memory in different powers of returns - a feature that has been found in...

This chapter reviews recent research adopting methods from statistical physics in theoretical or empirical work in economics and finance. The bulk of what has recently become known as 'econophysics' in broader circles draws its motivation from observed scaling laws in financial markets and the...

In this paper, we consider daily financial data of a collection of different stock market indices, exchange rates, and interest rates, and we analyze their multi-scaling properties by estimating a simple specification of the Markov- switching multifractal model (MSM). In order to see how well...

Simulations of agent-based models have shown that the stylized facts (unit-root, fat tails and volatility clustering) of financial markets have a possible explanation in the interactions among agents. However, the complexity, originating from the presence of non-linearity and interactions, often...

We investigate the predictability of both volatility and volume for a large sample of Japanese stocks. The particular emphasis of this paper is on assessing the performance of long memory time series models in comparison to their short-memory counterparts. Since long memory models should have a...

This review deals with several microscopic models of financial markets which have been studied by economists and physicists over the last decade: Kim- Markowitz, Levy-Levy-Solomon, Cont-Bouchaud, Solomon-Weisbuch, Lux-Marchesi, Donangelo-Sneppen and Solomon-Levy-Huang. After an overview of...

A growing body of recent literature allows for heterogenous trading strategies and limited rationality of agents in behavioral models of financial markets. More and more, this literature has been concerned with the explanation of some of the stylized facts of financial markets. It now seems that...

The financial crisis has fueled interest in alternatives to traditional asset classes that might be less affected by large market gyrations and, thus, provide for a less volatile development of a portfolio. One attempt at selecting stocks that are less prone to extreme risks, is obeyance of...