We present a novel methodology to determine the fundamental value of firms in the social-networking sector, motivated by recent realized IPOs and by reports that suggest sky-high valuations of firms such as Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn Corp., Pandora Media Inc, Twitter, Zynga. Our valuation of...

The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is stressing the world population, health care system and economies at a level not experienced since WWII or the last “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918. This shock provides a real-life test of the resilience of human societies, challenging our understanding and...

By combining (i) the economic theory of rational expectation bubbles, (ii) behavioral finance on imitation and herding of investors and traders and (iii) the mathematical and statistical physics of bifurcations and phase transitions, the logperiodic power law (LPPL) model has been developed as a...

We argue that the present crisis and stalling economy that have been ongoing since 2007 are rooted in the delusionary belief in policies based on a “perpetual money machine” type of thinking. We document strong evidence that, since the early 1980s, consumption has been increasingly funded by...

By combining (i) the economic theory of rational expectation bubbles, (ii) behavioral finance on imitation and herding of investors and traders and (iii) the mathematical and statistical physics of bifurcations and phase transitions, the log-periodic power law (LPPL) model has been developed as...

We apply two non-parametric methods to test further the hypothesis that log-periodicity characterizes the detrended price trajectory of large financial indices prior to financial crashes or strong corrections. The analysis using the so-called (H,q)-derivative is applied to seven time series...

We argue that the word ``critical'' in the title is not purely literary. Based on our and other previous work on nonlinear complex dynamical systems, we summarize present evidence, on the Oct. 1929, Oct. 1987, Oct. 1987 Hong-Kong, Aug. 1998 global market events and on the 1985 Forex event, for...

At what level should government or companies support research? This complex multi-faceted question encompasses such qualitative bonus as satisfying natural human curiosity, the quest for knowledge and the impact on education and culture, but one of its most scrutinized component reduces to the...