We survey a theory of the economic underpinnings of the fat-tailed distributions of a number of financial variables, such as returns and trading volumes. Our theory posits that they have a common origin in the strategic trading behavior of very large financial institutions in a relatively...

We refer to the framework developed by Ijiri and Simon (1977) and to the notion of independent submarkets (Sutton 1998) to provide a simple candidate explanation for the shape of the firm growth distribution based on a model of proportional growth at the level of both the introduction of new...