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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

We investigate the possible drawbacks of employing the standard Pearson estimator to measure correlation coefficients between financial stocks in the presence of non-stationary behavior, and we provide empirical evidence against the well-established common knowledge that using longer price time...

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...

In a previous study the authors have identified a small core of directors who are both highly central to the entire network of German corporate boards as well as closely connected among themselves. In this note the authors provide an update of their previous results using the composition of...

We propose a nonparametric method to determine the functional form of the noise density in discrete-time stochastic volatility models of financial returns. Our approach suggests that the assumption of Gaussian noise is often adequate, but we do observe deviations from Gaussian noise for some...