This paper illustrates how fluctuations in aggregate economic activity can result from many small, independent shocks to individual sectors. The effects of the small independent shocks fail to cancel in the aggregate due to the presence of two non-standard assumptions: local interaction between...

This paper illustrates how fluctuations in aggregate economic activity can result from many small, independent shocks to individual sectors. The effects of the small independent shocks fail to cancel in the aggregate due to the presence of two non-standard assumptions: local interaction between...

The Bak–Chen–Tang forest fire model (Phys. Lett. A 147 (1999) 297) was proposed as a toy model of turbulent systems, where energy (in the form of trees) is injected uniformly and globally, but is dissipated (burns) locally. We review the existing results on the spatial and temporal...

The forest fire model (Phys. Lett. A 147 (1990) 297) was proposed as a toy model of turbulent systems, where energy (in the form of trees) is injected uniformly and globally, but is dissipated (burns) locally. We found a novel scaling form for the spatial distribution of dissipation (fires) in...

This paper illustrates how fluctuations in aggregate economic activity can result from many small, independent shocks to individual sectors. The effects of the small independent shocks fail to cancel in the aggregate due to the presence of two non-standard assumptions: local interaction between...

A simple model economy with locally interacting producers and consumers is introduced. When driven by extremal dynamics, the model self-organizes {\em not} to an attractor state, but to an asymptote, on which the economy has a constant rate of deflation, is critical, and exhibits avalanches of...