This manuscript is a brief summary of a talk designed to address the question of whether two of the pillars of the field of phase transitions and critical phenomena—scale invariance and universality—can be useful in guiding research on interpreting empirical data on economic fluctuations....

Anomalous diffusion in artificial and natural stochastic processes is studied through the statistics of small-scale fluctuations. It is shown that the moments of certain locally averaged quantities, such as the square or absolute increments, do not scale like power laws, as generally assumed. A...