Humankind is confronted with a "nuclear stewardship curse'', facing the prospect of needing to manage nuclear products over long time scales in the face of the short-time scales of human polities. I propose a super Manhattan-type effort to rejuvenate the nuclear energy industry to overcome the...

This short review presents a selected history of the mutual fertilization between physics and economics, from Isaac Newton and Adam Smith to the present. The fundamentally different perspectives embraced in theories developed in financial economics compared with physics are dissected with the...

We develop the concept of “dragon-kings” corresponding to meaningful outliers, which are found to coexist with power laws in the distributions of event sizes under a broad range of conditions in a large variety of systems. These dragon-kings reveal the existence of mechanisms of...

Krugman (1991)'s target zone model has become the reference of a large part of this literature. Despite its simplicity and elegance, empirical evidence has been lacking. Deriving from Krugman's model analytical expressions for the conditional volatility and density distribution close to the...

We study the performance of the euro/Swiss franc exchange rate in the extraordinary period from September 6, 2011 and January 15, 2015 when the Swiss National Bank enforced a minimum exchange rate of 1.20 Swiss francs per euro. Within the general framework built on geometric Brownian motions...

We present a quantitative characterisation of the fluctuations of the annualized growth rate of the real US GDP per capita growth at many scales, using a wavelet transform analysis of two data sets, quarterly data from 1947 to 2015 and annual data from 1800 to 2010. Our main finding is that the...

We consider the detection of multiple outliers in Exponential and Pareto samples -- as well as general samples that have approximately Exponential or Pareto tails, thanks to Extreme Value Theory. It is shown that a simple "robust'' modification of common test statistics makes inward sequential...

We report strong evidence that changes of momentum, i.e. "acceleration", defined as the first difference of successive returns, provide better performance and higher explanatory power than momentum. The corresponding Γ-factor explains the momentum-sorted portfolios entirely but not the reverse....

The authors assess the performance of the real-time diagnostic, openly presented to the public on the website of the Financial Crisis Observatory (FCO) at ETH Zurich, of the bubble regime that developed in Chinese stock markets since mid-2014 and that started to burst in June 2015. The analysis...

We augment the existing literature using the Log-Periodic Power Law Singular (LPPLS) structures in the log-price dynamics to diagnose financial bubbles by providing three main innovations. First, we introduce the quantile regression to the LPPLS detection problem. This allows us to disentangle...