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...

We study the annual growth rates of six macroeconomic variables: public debt, public health expenditures, exports of goods, government consumption expenditures, total exports of goods and services, and total imports of goods and services. For each variable, we find (i) that the distribution of...

Understanding correlations in complex systems is crucial in the face of turbulence, such as the ongoing financial crisis. However, in complex systems, such as financial systems, correlations are not constant but instead vary in time. Here we address the question of quantifying state-dependent...

We introduce a future orientation index to quantify the degree to which Internet users worldwide seek more information about years in the future than years in the past. We analyse Google logs and find a striking correlation between the country's GDP and the predisposition of its inhabitants to...

Because financial crises are characterized by dangerous rare events that occur more frequently than those predicted by models with finite variances, we investigate the underlying stochastic process generating these events. In the 1960s Mandelbrot [Mandelbrot B (1963) J Bus 36:394-419] and Fama...

The impacts of the Subprime Financial crisis resulted in generally similar decline and volatility in both developed and emerging stock markets. However, in the aftermath of the crisis, the performance of emerging economies was stronger. To investigate this phenomena, this paper seeks to gauge...

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...