In this chapter, we outline the reasons why economics has been concerned with non-linear dynamics, with a particular focus on business cycles and on economic growth. Using varying perspectives, we discuss the salient historical mathematical approaches to the problem and the results that were...

As mentioned in the Introduction, Sect. 1.2, the objective of this book is twofold: to provide a personal specification of a business cycle model within the Kaldor-Kalecki framework (see Chap. 16) and to choose a chaotic specification of the Harrod model (Sportelli and Celi (Metroeconomica...

In this chapter, we describe growth and cycles in economics as a struggle between capitalists and workers. We first present the Phillips curve (which statistically relates unemployment with the rate of change of nominal wages) and then the Goodwin model. The latter reinterprets, in economical...

This chapter is dedicated to describe RQA applications in detecting spatio-temporal recurrent patterns of dynamical regimes of economic time series. Here we investigate the nature of economic dynamics and specifically of business cycles Orlando and Zimatore (Chaos, Solitons Fractals 110:82–94,...

After having illustrated in Chap. 13 the Harrod’s model and a chaotic specification of it, in this Chapter we are going to prove that (1) real data could be obtained by a suitable calibration of model’s parameters, (2) the calibrated model confirms theoretical predictions (Orlando and Della...

The objective of our study is to predict the financial losses that may result from natural disasters, along with their level of volatility, over a period of 1 to 15 years. Volatility can lead to significant fluctuations in Profit and Loss (P&L) for companies that are affected by unexpected...

The aim of this paper is to propose a new methodology that allows forecasting, through Vasicek and CIR models, of future expected interest rates based on rolling windows from observed financial market data. The novelty, apart from the use of those models not for pricing but for forecasting the...