Self-similar models are largely used to describe the extinction rate of biological species. In this paper we analyse the extinction rate of firms in eight OECD countries. Firms are classified by industrial sectors and sizes. We find that while a power-law distribution with exponent close to 2...

A firms growth and failure are the two sides of the same coin. This paper reports new phenomenological findings for firm size distribution and growth, and bankruptcy. This paper is based on [Y. Fujiwara et al., Physica A 335 (2004) 197] and on [Y. Fujiwara, Physica A 337 (2004) 219]. See also...

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...

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...

We study the duration distribution of recessions and recoveries occurred in a pool of industrialized countries during the last 120 years. We find that for recessions the duration is distributed according to a power law, and that the power exponent is virtually invariant as we split up the time...

Starting from some regularities of the Boulogne s/mer fish market, the model proposed here shows that in many circumstances the collective behavior may be ‘reasonable’ whereas the individuals may not be so. The properties which are empirically clear at the aggregate level are not necessarily...

Econophysics has already made a number of important empirical contributions to our understanding of the social and economic world. These fall mainly into the areas of finance and industrial economics, where in each case there is a large amount of reasonably well-defined data.

Dynamical systems with components whose sizes evolve according to multiplicative stochastic rules have been recently combined with entry and exit processes. We show that the assumptions usually made in modeling exits are at odds with the available evidence. We discuss a recently proposed...

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 study the size distribution of business cycles phases, that is expansions and contractions, for a sample of 16 industrialized countries over 120 years. We find that the best-fitting distribution for both expansions and contractions is Weibull, meaning that business cycles possess a...