We study the cascading dynamics immediately before and immediately after 219 market shocks. We define the time of a market shock T_{c} to be the time for which the market volatility V(T_{c}) has a peak that exceeds a predetermined threshold. The cascade of high volatility "aftershocks" triggered...

We study the behavior of U.S. markets both before and after U.S. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings, and show that the announcement of a U.S. Federal Reserve rate change causes a financial shock, where the dynamics after the announcement is described by an analogue of the Omori...

We analyze the size dependence and temporal stability of firm bankruptcy risk in the US economy by applying Zipf scaling techniques. We focus on a single risk factor - the debt-to-asset ratio R - in order to study the stability of the Zipf distribution of R over time. We find that the Zipf...

In finance, one usually deals not with prices but with growth rates R, defined as the difference in logarithm between two consecutive prices. Here we consider not the trading volume, but rather the volume growth rate R̃, the difference in logarithm between two consecutive values of trading...

Public debt is one of the important economic variables that quantitatively describes a nation's economy. Because bankruptcy is a risk faced even by institutions as large as governments (e.g. Iceland), national debt should be strictly controlled with respect to national wealth. Also, the problem...

Time-dependent economic, technological, and social factors can artificially inflate or deflate quantitative measures for career success. Here we develop and test a statistical method for normalizing career success metrics across time dependent factors. In particular, this method addresses the...

Understanding how institutional changes within academia may affect the overall potential of science requires a better quantitative representation of how careers evolve over time. Since knowledge spillovers, cumulative advantage, competition, and collaboration are distinctive features of the...

Statistical analysis is a major aspect of baseball, from player averages to historical benchmarks and records. Much of baseball fanfare is based around players exceeding the norm, some in a single game and others over a long career. Career statistics serve as a metric for classifying players and...

Recent “science of science” research shows common regularities in the publication patterns of scientific papers across time and discipline. Here, we analyze the complete publication careers of 300 scientists and find remarkable regularity in the functional form of the rank-citation profile...

The Matthew effect refers to the adage written some two-thousand years ago in the Gospel of St. Matthew: “For to all those who have, more will be given.” Even two millennia later, this idiom is used by sociologists to qualitatively describe the dynamics of individual progress and the...