We perform a careful spectral analysis of the correlation structures observed in real and financial returns for a large pool of long-lived US corporations, and find that financial returns are characterized by strong collective fluctuations that are absent from real returns. Once the excessive...

We study some properties of eigenvalue spectra of financial correlation matrices. In particular, we investigate the nature of the large eigenvalue bulks which are observed empirically, and which have often been regarded as a consequence of the supposedly large amount of noise contained in...

We perform a careful spectral analysis of the correlation structures observed in real and financial returns for a large pool of long-lived US corporations, and find that financial returns are characterized by strong collective fluctuations that are absent from real returns. Once the excessive...

Power law behavior has been recognized to be a pervasive feature of many phenomena in natural and social sciences. While immense research efforts have been devoted to the analysis of behavioral mechanisms responsible for the ubiquity of power-law scaling, the strong theoretical foundation of...

In this paper, we analyze the distributional properties of the balance sheets of Icelandic firms by performing an empirical analysis of total assets, profit rates and growth rates using a data set of 2818 Icelandic firms during the period 2000-2009. We find that the firms size measure, i.e....

A growing body of literature reports evidence of social interaction effects in survey expectations. In this note, we argue that evidence in favor of social interaction effects should be treated with caution, or could even be spurious. Utilizing a parsimonious stochastic model of expectation...

From a statistical point of view, the prevalence of non-Gaussian distributions in nancial returns and their volatilities shows that the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) often does not apply in nancial markets. In this paper we take the position that the independence assumption of the CLT is violated...

The basic philosophy behind Gibrat's rule of proportionate effect has been to find some common mechanism in the growth process of business firms, based on the idea that growth rates are independent of size and drawn from the same distribution. After decades of research, however, it seems fair to...