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Econophysics: What Can Physicists Contribute to Economics?

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Traffic and Granular Flow ’99

Abstract

In recent years, a considerable number of physicists have started applying physics concepts and methods to understand economic phenomena. The term “Econophysics” is sometimes used to describe this work. Economic fluctuations can have many repercussions, and understanding fluctuations is a topic that many physicists have contributed to in recent years. Further, economic systems are examples of complex interacting systems for which a huge amount of data exist and it is possible that the experience gained by physicists in studying fluctuations in physical systems might yield new results in economics. Much recent work in econophysics is focused on understanding the peculiar statistical properties of price fluctuations in financial time series. In this talk, we discuss three recent results. The first result concerns the probability distribution of stock price fluctuations. This distribution decreases with increasing fluctuations with a power-law tail well outside the Lévy stable regime and describes fluctuations that differ by as much as 8 orders of magnitude. Further, this non stable distribution preserves its functional form for fluctuations on time scales that differ by 3 orders of magnitude, from 1 min up to approximately 10 days. The second result concerns the accurate quantification of volatility correlations in financial time series. While price fluctuations themselves have rapidly decaying correlations, the volatility estimated by using either the absolute value or the square of the price fluctuations has correlations that decay as a power-law and persist for several months. The third result bears on the application of random matrix theory to understand the correlations among price fluctuations of any two different stocks. We compare the statistics of the cross-correlation matrix constructed from price fluctuations of the leading 1000 stocks and a matrix with independent random elements, i.e., a random matrix. Contrary to first expectations, we find little or no deviation from the universal predictions of random matrix theory for all but a few of the largest eigenvalues of the cross-correlation matrix.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    H. E. Stanley, L. A. Nunes Amaral, P. Gopikrishnan, V. Plerou & B. Rosenow

  2. Department of Physics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, 02617, USA

    V. Plerou

  3. Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität zu Köln, 50937, Köln, Germany

    B. Rosenow

Authors
  1. H. E. Stanley
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  2. L. A. Nunes Amaral
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  3. P. Gopikrishnan
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  4. V. Plerou
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  5. B. Rosenow
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Wirtschaft und Verkehr, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Dirk Helbing

  2. ICA 1 Universität Stuttgart, Pfaffenwaldring 57/III, 70550, Stuttgart, Germany

    Hans J. Herrmann

  3. Physik von Transport und Verkehr, Gerhard-Mercator-Universität Duisburg, Lotharstraße 1, 47048, Duisburg, Germany

    Michael Schreckenberg

  4. Theoretische Physik, Gerhard-Mercator-Universität Duisburg, Lotharstraße 1, 47048, Duisburg, Germany

    Dietrich E. Wolf

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Stanley, H.E., Nunes Amaral, L.A., Gopikrishnan, P., Plerou, V., Rosenow, B. (2000). Econophysics: What Can Physicists Contribute to Economics?. In: Helbing, D., Herrmann, H.J., Schreckenberg, M., Wolf, D.E. (eds) Traffic and Granular Flow ’99. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-59751-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-59751-0_2

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