Phenomena as diverse as breeding bird populations, the size of U.S. firms, money invested in mutual funds, and the scientific output of universities all show unusual but remarkably similar growth fluctuations. The fluctuations display characteristic features, including heavy tails and anomalous...

We study how the recent national housing boom and bust affected college enrollment and attainment during the 2000s. We exploit cross-city variation in local housing booms, and use a variety of data sources and empirical methods, including models that use plausibly exogenous variation in housing...

The growth of business firms is an example of a system of complex interacting units that resembles complex interacting systems in nature such as earthquakes. Remarkably, work in econophysics has provided evidence that the statistical properties of the growth of business firms follow the same...