We analyze the multifractal spectra of daily foreign exchange rates for Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Thailand with respect to the United States Dollar from 1991 to 2005. We find that the return time series show multifractal features for all four cases. To observe the effect of the Asian currency...

We analyze daily prices of 29 commodities and 2449 stocks, each over a period of $\approx 15$ years. We find that the price fluctuations for commodities have a significantly broader multifractal spectrum than for stocks. We also propose that multifractal properties of both stocks and commodities...

We investigate the two components of the total daily return (close-to-close), the overnight return (close-to-open) and the daytime return (open-to-close), as well as the corresponding volatilities of the 2215 NYSE stocks from 1988 to 2007. The tail distribution of the volatility, the long-term...

We analyze the fluctuations in the gross domestic product (GDP) of 152 countries for the period 1950--1992. We find that (i) the distribution of annual growth rates for countries of a given GDP decays with ``fatter'' tails than for a Gaussian, and (ii) the width of the distribution scales as a...

We analyze the memory in volatility by studying volatility return intervals, defined as the time between two consecutive fluctuations larger than a given threshold, in time periods following stock market crashes. Such an aftercrash period is characterized by the Omori law, which describes the...

We study how the presence of correlations in physical variables contributes to the form of probability distributions. We investigate a process with correlations in the variance generated by (i) a Gaussian or (ii) a truncated L\'{e}vy distribution. For both (i) and (ii), we find that due to the...

The correlation function of a financial index of the New York stock exchange, the S&P 500, is analyzed at 1 min intervals over the 13-year period, Jan 84 -- Dec 96. We quantify the correlations of the absolute values of the index increment. We find that these correlations can be described by two...

We study the volatility of the S&P500 stock index from 1984 to 1996 and find that the volatility distribution can be very well described by a log-normal function. Further, using detrended fluctuation analysis we show that the volatility is power-law correlated with Hurst exponent $\alpha\cong0.9$.

We develop a scale-invariant truncated L\'evy (STL) process to describe physical systems characterized by correlated stochastic variables. The STL process exhibits L\'evy stability for the probability density, and hence shows scaling properties (as observed in empirical data); it has the...

The relationship between the size and the variance of firm growth rates is known to follow an approximate power-law behavior σ(S) similar to S^-β(S) where S is the firm size and β(S) almost equal to 0.2 is an exponent weakly dependent on S. Here we show how a model of proportional growth...