At the intersection between statistical physics and rigorous econometric analysis, this powerful new framework sheds light on how innovation and competition shape the growth and decline of companies and industries. Analyzing various sources of data including a unique micro level database which...

The size distribution of business firms is explained using number and size of firms' constituent components. It is a lognormal distribution multiplied by a stretching factor which can lead to a Pareto upper tail. This result is confirmed empirically

We introduce a model of proportional growth to explain the distribution Pg(g) of business-firm growth rates. The model predicts that Pg(g) is exponential in the central part and depicts an asymptotic power-law behavior in the tails with an exponent z=3. Because of data limitations, previous...

This manuscript is a brief summary of a talk designed to address the question of whether two of the pillars of the field of phase transitions and critical phenomena—scale invariance and universality—can be useful in guiding research on interpreting empirical data on economic fluctuations....

In recent years, physicists have started applying concepts and methods of statistical physics to study economic problems. The word “Econophysics” is sometimes used to refer to this work. Much recent work is focused on understanding the statistical properties of financial time series. One...