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....

In recent years, physicists have started applying concepts and methods of statistical physics to study economic problems. The word “Econophysics” is sometimes used to refer to this work. Much recent work is focused on understanding the statistical properties of financial time series. One...

A time series can be decomposed into two sub-series: a magnitude series and a sign series. Here we analyze separately the scaling properties of the magnitude series and the sign series using the increment time series of cardiac interbeat intervals as an example. We find that time series having...

Properly estimating correlations and understanding how they change under different economic conditions plays a key role in asset pricing models, risk management, and many econometric models. In this paper we introduce a robust framework to identify a meaningful correlation relationship, address...

We study the annual growth rates of six macroeconomic variables: public debt, public health expenditures, exports of goods, government consumption expenditures, total exports of goods and services, and total imports of goods and services. For each variable, we find (i) that the distribution of...

We study the annual growth rates of six macroeconomic variables: public debt, public health expenditures, exports of goods, government consumption expenditures, total exports of goods and services, and total imports of goods and services. For each variable, we find (i) that the distribution of...